If I had my druthers, I would most certainly choose getting up with the sun. Thick black night lies endlessly outside these windows just now; morning comes in darkness. To wake in a summer sun is pure blessing; half a curse to open your eyes to cold darkness. It's only late October, so an hour and more will have to pass before a swell of light out east hints at morning. Outside my window sits nothing but ink.
A bellicose wind won't keep its mouth shut either. Out here, with no protection from trees, northwest winds do more than moan--they scream out a doleful tale that has absolutely no twists. It's a battering ram. Winter is on its way. Yesterday, that wind came up ferociously to hustle out a couple tons of soybean dust. Right now, the air in all that darkness is winter clear.
Last night we turned on the furnace, but I didn't hear it until just now, when it rose like its own quiet storm. The cat was balled into what little space separated husband from wife in our bed, my wife's arm over my chest. In a winter bed I become somehow more becoming, I guess, its own kind of blessing. I had just awakened, and there was the furnace, its sound and touch almost forgotten.
Friday, there will be snow, they say, which is to say we do. Someone heard it somewhere. In all this noise and darkness, snowbirds of every species and genus begin to dream of that other warmer world somewhere south.
With the lights on down here, there's nothing to see outside the windows, nothing but reflection. But if I stand upstairs in the darkness and look across the fields to the north, if I stare into a horizon that's not even there, that same onyx blanket will unfurl a thousand diamonds.
But's it's got to be dark for stars to be seen. They best appear in a night that's rich with gloriously cold winter air.
Tonight there's no moon; here and there across the darkness a barn light flickers. But the sky above is a artful gallery of innumerable stars.
There's always reasons to give thanks.
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