The Way the Morning Passes

Saturday.  Amazingly I wake again at 8:45 having prayed myself back to sleep at 6:15, and for once I feel rested.  Perhaps it is because of the windowless dark of my son's room, or the new mattress on his bed that recuperative sleep has blessed me. The light in the hallway hints of not just daylight, but sunlight.  Sunny days are pure gift, especially in Alaska where clouds so often dominate the summer sky, and hope for a decent season begins to wane as a solstice sun signals this side of the earth's turning toward darkness.  The light, or its lack, is so much a part of our consciousness here.

Bladder full, hunger deep, thirst chafing; reminders to the body to wake, to nurture, to live again another day, despite the raw emotion of the reasons I spend the night in my son's room, and not with my husband in mine.  Gratitude for this morning  is eclipsed by uncertainty of this day, tomorrow, the future.  But the sun is glorious, and choices can always be good.

So breakfast is whole wheat waffles, yogurt, blueberries after dressing in workout gear, and acknowledging that the hanging baskets need water, but they will have to wait.  Sunny mornings in Alaska are still cool, even though the sun barely ceases its sojourn in the visible sky, it reigns in this season, even in a season of rain.

Treadmill beckons because I have learned to love the sweat, the pace and mostly the sound of my music, the rhythmic pound of my feet on the belt--no hills, no dust or cars--a strange meditation in the dim garage. 

And the husband returns with reason, but no apology, and though the sky is still cloudless, the room brightens as does my soul.  The plants still need water, and the dry and warming air will cool sweat and anger and fear.  I need sunglasses.

It is a bittersweet task, this watering of baskets, this removing of spent blossoms on the petunias, as if each dead flower is like the seconds of light that tick off the clock that measures our daylight.  My children say that summer is over by the 4th of July and in a way they are right.  Flowers, in their mad, blooming frenzy under an inexhaustible sun hint of their spent effort, less buds, yellowing foliage.

Meditate.  Do not pray words, let words recede, hear breath, birds, the low scraping of the flagpole outside my window that has broken loose of its mooring but is held by wire and by the flag caught on the barbed wire fence.  Hear nothing and then Everything.

Write the words of the waning day and  of the morning, that passes.