…mornings…

I’ve always loved early mornings. My entire working life I somehow managed to have 7 am shifts and even when the alarm would go off at 5:00 and I’d hate getting out of my comfy bed I could still see the beauty in a good quiet morning. There’s something about a new day that is just so peaceful and beautiful. You never know how the new day will end and that’s part of the beauty of it. It might be the last sunrise you ever see. It might end with a new friend or broken leg, the sky could fall or a new love come into your life. It’s a wide open space with birds chirping and dew drying on the yard and a chill still in the air.

I think my most favorite mornings are vacation mornings. Waking up in a different place with new sounds and that feeling you get of anticipation to get out the door and explore. It’s never a bother to wake up early during vacations. A peek of sunshine and my eyes spring open and somehow I’m ready. Gimme some coffee and get out the door. I think this drove my daughters crazy when they were young. I’d be so upbeat in the mornings during our vacations and pushing them to hurry up and let’s go. My heart right now gets an ache thinking about it. My girls and I running out the door of random hotels always heading to a beach. I don’t know why we didn’t spend more time vacationing in the mountains or cities. We were always doing palm tree vacations. Still today that’s where my mind goes when I start pondering vacation plans.

Those days when I was young and bold and being a mom was everything and all encompassing. We were poor so just the fact that I managed to get my girls anywhere off of our island was a miracle in itself. We didn’t do it much when they were little but we did go Hawaii which was a great time and I cried when I looked out the airplane window and saw the island below us. It was surreal to me…a teenaged mom and struggling restaurant employee getting ready to land in Maui. The Hawaiian mornings were truly great and I haven’t been able to find coconut syrup anywhere else in the world like we had there in our favorite breakfast place.

I’ve had mornings in so many different great places as a kid and as an adult. Camping is also full of beautiful mornings. In our family we don’t consider it camping unless it’s done in a tent. I think that’s an Alaskan thing. In Idaho camping is done with an RV and although we’ve been here for more than twenty years that’s something the girls and I never caught on to. Camping = tent. Period. Waking up in a tent… There is nothing else like it. Last summer Rick and I went camping and the first night it started to rain. No big deal we went to bed early and snuggled in close together to sleep. The rain got worse and then came the thunder and lightening. I managed to fall asleep but woke up repeatedly to loud claps of thunder and flashes of lightening. The rain was hitting the tent so incredibly hard and instinctively I kept putting my hand out to feel the walls of the tent and the floor to see if water had gotten in. It didn’t. We slept.

In the morning I awoke and Rick wasn’t there and I could hear him outside the tent talking to my grandson; they had arrived after the storm started and slept in the car instead of trying to set up camp in the dark and the rain. I just listened to their talk and felt grateful that my husband feels love towards my grandbabies and my girls and I just lay there and felt the morning for a bit. The birds and the sun coming through the fabric of the tent… the heat that was starting to gather inside and how warm and comfortable I was even though I hadn’t slept well and I knew when I got up my body would be screaming like it does every morning but even more so for having slept on an air mattress. Camp coffee and sitting and listening to the crazy story of my daughter having gotten lost on the way to the campsight and then arriving after dark in the height of the storm. In moments like those nothing else matters and it makes me wish that every day could be a camp day and every morning I could wake up outside with animals and my loves sitting in the sun basking in the absolute glory of the day.

I’ve had mornings of waking up in the hospital, in my crazy days of had mornings of waking up in a strange bed, there was the morning after my dad died and waking up in my best friend’s bed after having fled to her house to get some sort of ordinary back into that crazy day. I’ve woken up in Florida as a child and as an adult with children of my own. I’ve had mornings on airplanes and even waking up on the floor of an airport in Alaska to people walking by my head where the night before I’d fallen asleep in a place I thought I’d have some privacy. Mornings with cats and dogs, rabbits and a pig. Waking up before sunrise to trudge out to the pigpen and upon seeing my pet suddenly forgetting that it was cold and I was sleepy and scratching that big hairy pig head and feeling so much love … it brings tears to my eyes remembering. I thought he would live forever. All of the mornings with animals inside the house and out and waking up to Freddy and Weeze whom I still can’t even think about 4 years later because losing them still is like losing apart of my own soul. Those two were always ready for morning. A trip outside for a potty break and then they’d come sit by me looking expectantly at me although they knew after all of those years that I’d be leaving the house for the day.

I’ve had mornings as a new mom and being so tired yet so excited at the same time. The type of exhaustion that only comes with parenting newborn babies. I remember looking forward to the days each of my babies would be out of their newborn stage and start sleeping all night until suddenly they are and they’re teens and then go off onto a life of their own and although it’s great to see them being independent I wish I could go back in time and be tired and awake in the middle of the night rocking my babies to sleep and pondering how they’d be as adults. One more morning of watching the sun come up while some early more TV show played in the background and looking down at the beautiful miracle sleeping on my lap and feeling like I will kill for them if I had to. Those mornings of newborns and chaos are so distant that all I know now is the feeling of it all and right now I think about my beautiful daughters and imagine Brittney sitting on the couch having coffee while my grandkids ask her repeatedly about the day’s plans. Chelsey waking up to the sweetness of Cody and bunnies and I wonder if my granddaughters are with her or if this is a morning when they’re with their dad. I’ve had mornings of waking up knowing that my daughters are having a morning with a newborn and wishing that I’d have prepared them more so it wouldn’t be so shocking like it was to me how much a baby can take up all of your days until suddenly they don’t anymore and they’re running around throwing kisses and naming inanimate objects. And the sweet greatness of the mornings after knowing that a new life was born the six times a grandbaby cage into my life. I remember each morning and the exact feeling of thinking that the day should be different somehow because a baby was born in our family. The world should stop and rejoice at the greatness of it and even still seventeen years later being so crazily in love with those children of my children that my mind goes to all sorts of crazy if I think someone or something intends to do them harm.

I’ve had dark mornings after my spine failed me and the darkness of losing everything was the first thing that entered my mind when my eyes flew open. Those mornings of pain and anxiety and the sick feeling of needing some help and it was nowhere to be found. And the mornings that came when my insomnia was so bad that it almost killed me. Sitting on the couch sick with lack of sleep and watching the day become light and knowing that another night had passed with no sleep and the feeling inside of my body of hopelessness as I knew my body was failing. Watching the morning come in after a night of being awake has a completely different feeling; dread and fear because you know that you have to live your day but your body isn’t working as it should and your brain is muddled from lack of sleep. When my doctor finally got me sleeping and I woke up with the TV on and sunlight pouring through the window by my bed I couldn’t believe that I’d finally slept and made it out of that horrible place. That was one of the best mornings of my life coming on the heels of a few of the worst of my life. Insomnia of that type is no joke and it will make you hate seeing the morning come in if you let it.

Things change and life happens and mornings never stay the same. For the sun and the clock it’s just a typical day but to everything else it’s similar but not the same. A flower has bloomed in my front yard and it’s the first one from seeds I planted last year. Seeing it there makes me feel like I wanna cry and I talk to that flower and welcome it to the day. It’s been a long time coming and it’s completely crazy but I feel connected to the things that I grow and it’s the reason why I like to start everything from a seed. I love plants of all types and colors and species. My daughters know by now that a plant is always a welcomed gift by me and those growing in my yard that were mother’s day gifts or birthday presents hold a special place in my heart. And these early summer mornings I go out and walk around my yard and check to see what’s new and also what’s decided that it’s time is done. The pumpkin plant in the front yard has really taken off and I make a mental note to start giving it extra water because experience tells me that pumpkins love their H2O.

The cats follow me around the yard and I talk to them as if they’re people and Sparkle even sits down and examines things with me and jumps around chasing things and bringing sweetness into my day. Bella stalks something over by the fence and suddenly here comes the neighborhood stray, Bubba, as if we’re his home and I go inside and dish him up some food. I leave the door open because I can tell it’s going to be a beautiful day and this day, today, I try hard not to form any sort of a plan in my head to try and control the day. Just let it play out the way it wants Ada… you never know if this is your last day. Savor each moment, relax and enjoy it. There are bees on the old kale that’s now flowering and I’m happy that I just let the kale grow because I haven’t seen a bee in the backyard for a really long time. I check to see if the little birds have come out to their makeshift window-porch yet. They haven’t but I can hear them inside the room chirping so sweetly in their way that is the nonstop background noise in our home. I feel so thankful for my husband who does his best to make things good for the animals that I love as I look around and see the different things he’s done for them and we ponder what to do with Krueger’s outdoor pen now that she’s gone. He keeps talking about tearing it down but neither of us have the heart to do it. We miss her so much and I think we both kind of feel as if one of these mornings were going to wake up and she’s going to be sitting in a ray of morning sun waiting for a cricket. Her pen is left untouched and oddly a patch of lettuce is growing right next to it and I just cut it all yesterday and gave it to my grandaughter’s bunnies to eat. I didn’t plant the lettuce there but that’s how things tend to go in my backyard. We have a Mulberry tree that gives us a ton of berries and nobody knows where it came from. It grows up through the chain link fence and has given my neighbor fits because she thinks it’s her job to worry about my tree and my fence. I won’t cut it down. Ever. We will just get a new fence. It’s a bona-fide tree now and towers over the house next door. No clue how it started growing there; it just did.

I started this particular morning in pain. My body is broken and although I’m used to it by now some mornings bring pain that shocks me still. This is how I know I’m strong. This is how I know I’m tough. It hurts so much and since surgery in February I can’t walk or stand up for more than 5 minutes or my leg dies and when I say it goes numb it doesn’t actually become numb; that would be much better than what it does. It dies. That’s the only way that I can describe it. It dies and won’t hold me up but at the same time the pain escalates to the point that I can’t stay focused on what I’m doing as my mind starts to panic that we’re going down. It’s not great. It’s hard to put a positive spin on the situation going on with my body right now but if a positive spin is going to come to me it will be in the quiet beauty of a morning. If I can have any sort of control over my day I will let that control be with my mind and within my soul. I’ll control my reaction to the horrible pain in my dead leg.

That I’ve woken up yet again to a beautiful day is a gift in itself. Fifty three years of mornings. Mornings full of love and of gratitude for this life that from the outside I’m sure looks pathetic but to me has been full of God’s grace and blessings. That I wake up knowing that my little family is still safe and sound in their respective homes and that my own home is full of love and positive energy…pets and plants and that there’s plenty of food to eat and we’re sheltered from any and all storms. My beautiful Buzzard isn’t waking me up anymore as she’s learned that she’s ok and that HER mornings are beautiful now… there’s food and water and she’s learned that I eventually come for her and she’s content and unafraid. That’s all that I really want a morning to be. In all of my brokenness I can bring something beautiful to those that I love. I can go outside and watch the fruits of my labor blooming in the yard or producing food from seeds planted lovingly by myself of somehow placed in the ground by birds or the squirrels that also call my yard their home. We’re all squared away and in a few hours this morning shall be done like all of the others and the day is fresh to be whatever we want it to be or whatever it wants to be to us.

Mornings are my favorite. I’m blessed to have seen so many and forever thankful I’ll be. I kind of hope that when my day does come I’ll pass from here in the beauty of a morning. That would be neat and the cherry on top of this life I’ve been given. I hope and pray that will be another 53 years from now because I do so love it here and especially in the early morning hours as I experience another new day be born. God bless us all. We’ve been given so much and we so often take it all for granted. Relax and enjoy the day. Listen to the sounds and really see what the day is trying to show you. Turn off the fake noise and the fake lights and really see what the morning holds. That’s my unsolicited advice for the day. It’s really meant for my own self but of you need that advice feel free to use it too.