There’s no backing out of morning. It’s going to happen no matter how I shudder when I pull the blanket back. Our wooden floors are piercing cold when I put my feet down – a kind of ice therapy that makes me feel that the day is beginning with resonance and energy and that there is no backing out of it. I walk down our long hallway without slippers, through a dull leftover light and into the kitchen. I can only embrace the chilliness when waking is confined to my feet and moves up one body part at a time, and when it doesn’t include any my brain.
In these early hours, I might open a shutter to see if the world is still there. My view is of stillness and hazy, indefinite distances. Everything seems a long way off, in some remote area that may or may not turn into a day of prospects. By contrast, summer mornings are packed with lawn services whose trucks and trailers pull up to curbs and fired up their furious leaf blowers. It’s not so much the noise that annoying, although it doesn’t help, but the way these trucks park way off the curb so walkers must figure out how to get around them without being creamed by oncoming traffic.
On these wintery mornings it is so quiet that I can hear myself thinking, and I’m drifting today to thoughts of an older lady named Tippy, a walker, who used to do laps around our block years ago. She was hit by an oncoming car when she came around one of those lawn trucks with the extended trailers. In the quiet renewal of winter, between the damp and the dinginess, Tippy’s presence, her quiet ways and fragility, are still recovering and finding renewal. There are no leaf blowers or zero turn arounds out there making a racket. They have been replaced this morning with solace and peace for Tippy. I can see her still through a louvered shutter I just opened. She is stopping to get the latest scoop on a neighbor and chatting with friends she has known all her life. My feet are still cold as ice, but I can see a light coming from Tippy out there, I can see her as if she is right next to me, and when I see her on these kinds of mornings, it doesn’t look like winter at all.
I have to plan for my early winter mornings though, get a strategy for them the night before. When our days go suddenly dim at 4:30 and I haven’t seen the sun all day, I move the day along by visiting my bird feeder and fill it to the brim with peanuts and a seed mix. I will be rewarded with an early crowd of enthusiastic birds. Funny, because I used to hate waking up, as if I had a choice, because I dreaded the weight of the day’s to-do list. Now I let the birds take that responsibility – they can have all the get up and go they want, and all that’s required of me is to open the shutter and enjoy the spectacle at the bird feeder.
Winter is the time for ambitions to be put aside and for devotions to happen, a time to quietly drift, trusting in those first ideas that come along, the ones that fly in for some food and nudge me, not the ones that come in screaming for more. I have a few unfinished dreams from the night before that have been edged out by the arrival of the first sparrows. I like these birds, but especially when they are hungry. They are breakfast people, sparrows are, and are hustling about, picking and poking, nudging each other off perches, irritable and crabby until they see me getting my first cup of coffee, and settle down. They know where their next meal is coming from.
I don’t have to wake up very fast when Extraordinary is right in front of me. Birds, feathers, and flight...it is all a marvelous wonder, a bit of magic that keeps my eyes from going back to sleep. There will be no sun today, but there is a lot of movement around the feeder, heated exchanges over a seed or two. We tend to overlook the phenomenon of flight when it is all around us, but in the winter, all kinds of birds of flight stirs the gray air, swirls it around and reminds us that the seasons are always changing. I feel like I have a front row seat to a disorderly circus with hundreds of cameo appearances, performers who make their entrance, grab a seed or two, then dive for cover. It is a chaotic play with no acts and no intermissions.
When birds are eating, they don’t do a lot of talking or jabbering, and really, who wants a chatterbox in the morning anyway? Winter takes a long time to warm up to anything, and perhaps winter never wakes up at all to a talker. Birds are getting something done early, though. They are dressed and ready, and smart to join the early morning show so they can go straight back to bed and stay warm until April.
I don’t know this for sure, but I imagine that Tippy loved birds. She was a slight woman and had a bent look about her stance when she walked past my house. She was in her eighties, yet she always called me Mr. Bender when she saw me because, she said, that is how we talk to teachers. I hardly knew her at all, but she still addressed me as if I deserved a title. How can we not like people like Tippy, who give us titles when they speak to us? It is in the winter that I miss her the most.
I am posted by the window and trying to figure out which circus act is coming up next. The sparrows are changing their tactics as other birds wake up and are coming in as squadrons. They have to stick together as a group, but get pushed off easily by the titmice, and thrushes, who are quick and have pointed beaks. Visitors like house finches and juncos try to pile on two or three at a time, flitting, and fluttering, trying to be hummingbirds until a spot opens up. It is usually the spotted starlings, however, that clear the air. They are refugees from the 1904 World’s Fair and have learned to be pushy since then. Their long yellow beaks reach far into the feeder like needles and throw out everything but the peanuts. I root for the little guy, the downy woodpecker, who steals in like a bandit wearing a red cap and will not be bullied by any bird. Seeds are being flicked off to the ground right and left for the doves who are allowing the morning to warm up on its own.
It seems as if time stops when everything is pitch quiet, when seldom is heard. I imagine that the birds know me as the guy in the window – the guy who bought tickets in the front row for their circus, but that is all they know. I’ve learned to recognize individual birds now, which songbirds will take the top perch, and which ones stick around for a second helping. I am in the midst of my drift here, watching the fledgling friends without names, winged performers, eat their breakfast at my winter seed-table.
The songbirds are a patch of color in an otherwise dull, misty morning. I stand here at my paned window, both of my hands wrapped around the warmth of my coffee cup, and I’m thinking of Tippy. She is the mourning dove who has yet to join the circus but will soon waddle in calmly with cold feet and give the winter its title.