The dog was at my knee as I walked out through the screen door into the morning twilight. I was barely awake and moving slowly and so was he. Sleep was still sticky in my eyes and my morning dreams weren’t quite done with their work on my brain so I was fuzzy headed. The sky was still in that sleepy indecisive place between night and day too and and the broody purple clouds, still heavy with darkness looked like they were using the treetops to push themselves up into the morning sky. As their edges peeked up over the edge of my house like a giant Kilroy was here graffiti painting, they were laced in an intense electric pink and gold that felt like ferocious determination. They were suddenly as explosively sharp as they were bright and as the sun continued to rise, they cut through the gloom and lightened the color of the clouds as well as my mood.

I’d forgotten how much I loved getting up before sunrise. I’d stopped leaping out of bed at that hour the day after my husband died–but not because he had died. It was because some creature had broken into my chicken coop while I was at the hospital the night of his death and killed all of my hens, ending the need for my early rising. I’ve tried to take advantage of those extra minutes and sometimes hours to sleep or at least lie in bed to percolate but it was never truly as gratifying and jumping up before the rest of the household and greeting the day as it rose after me. I lacked purpose though so I didn’t leap out of bed before the sun for a long time and that made me sluggish and sore and probably a little mean. I have a new dog now though, a puppy really, even though he looks like a full grown dog. He is an 8 month old shepherd who needs a lot of attention and I am attempting to train him, as must be done when a dog the size of a small pony moves into the house. That, of course, means the commencement of new early morning rituals–emphasis on early. Ugh. Today I am feeling simultaneously grumpy and grateful. Grumpful.

As the fish crows flew over the roof of the house calling uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, they made me giggle. I imagine their heads shaking and wings flapping in a cartoonish way like they are struggling with impulse control and pushing away fat slices of cake and glasses of whiskey. The indigo buntings were shaking the ragweed stalks at the edge of the road as they picked them clean of their seeds. Several naked stalks were already bent and lying across the road. The Carolina wren was singing loudly from atop the mulberry tree and a squirrel was chittering from somewhere up in the tall loblolly. The dog, bravely shuffling along ahead of me, was kicking up dust from the dry dirt road with his thick red feet, his nose in the air and eyes focused on the edge of the wood where he knew the rabbits sometimes traveled. He was awake now and trying to pull me into the morning with him. I could see his shiny white teeth as he looked back at me and smiled. I have never felt more grumpful.