Mornings

Once upon a time, my mum – Texas Mum, that is – told me it was no wonder she'd been sick since, it turned out, she was full of puke. A few years previously, Dad explained that his antipathy toward France sprung from its being chock full of French people. By similar logic, I wouldn't mind mornings half so much if they didn't happen so friggen' early.

That's not even sarcastic! Mornings are beautiful. Sunrise has a different cast to it than sunset, the colours more silvery, the sky more akin to moonstone than opal as first light tiptoes over the land and dances glittering across the mouth of the Columbia river. On rainy mornings, the trees sing to each other in whispers and the frog in my neighbour's pond sings the amphibian blues. The air itself is bright with the scent of green, growing things and spicy-sweet with spring flowers and the burgeoning sunlight sets the red, blue and white cargo ships aglow. Early mist makes the distant hills of the Coastal Range look like the layered ivory of a cameo portrait and gulls flying high catch, on their long white wings, bright golden sunlight that has yet to reach lower altitudes.

And there I am, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, blundering into walls. It's ridiculous, like one of those bump-and-go toys in the shape of a grown human being. The walls wait in ambush for me, I swear, and that's not the least of it. The other day, I started to pour coffee beans into the kettle – unground coffee beans, mind you. Into the kettle. I need coffee to wake up enough to make coffee.

This is pathetic, and certainly not conducive to enjoying nature's beauty. It's less that I'm too grumpy to revel in its glory and more that if I stop to smell the roses, or the bluebells, or whatever, I'll forget to start again. This has been known to happen. Someone will find me standing on the front stairs, staring slack-jawed at the sky as if I've never seen it before, and quite reasonably ask me why, since it's seven thirty and I get up at six, I haven't even fed the goat yet.

At that point, unfortunately, I'll be crabby at them. There will be no sane reason for the crankiness. The other person didn't do anything wrong, and I'm not inherently a morning grump. It's just that people are way, way too complicated for any brain that currently finds “don't put the broom in the refrigerator” a challenging task.

By nine or ten, the coffee has kicked in and I start to more or less resemble an adult sapient being. So, with luck, do my family. However, by nine or ten, the fresh glory of early morning has turned into full daylight, the fog usually has burned off, the frog has gone to bed and the gulls have returned to their day-job as huge feathery nuisances. Before anyone suggests I go to bed and get up earlier, I turn in between ten and eleven and get up at six. It's not me, it's mornings and their terrible, terrible timing.

I vote we start a petition to have them postponed by a few hours each day. We'll need something to occupy that time, of course. My personal nomination would be mid-afternoon, when the sun's high enough that shadows lose their depth and stepping outside feels a bit like going for a walk in a toaster oven. That crap is more than welcome to happen while I'm still too groggy to feel it. What say you?