Primo’s face when we headed out the door at 4:30 the other morning. He awakened and woke me up and as I herded him back to his bedroom he peeked out the window and gasped, "Wow, Mom, look at that!" Well, he thought it was snowing, but it was that pre-dawn time of day when the sun’s light mixes into the black of night and the result is a palette of electric grays that shift and shimmer as the spaces between the dark receive the sun's light. Or something like that.
“I used to go running early in the morning like this,” I told him. “When I was younger.” “Can we go out, Mom?” For a moment I mentally kicked myself for telling him that story. At this age all I wanted to do was go back to bed. But it was one of those child-led moments that begged to be, so I said, “Sure. Let’s be very quiet.” And we snuck out of the house.
I watched his face as we walked into the pre-dawn world of our neighbourhood, a familiar place so foreign now. There’s that smell, you know, of the earth waking up. It’s so clean and sweet at this time of day. It’s so in between, not night, not day, a kind of limbic limbo, and I could see that he sensed it too. His face got an expression of ecstatic wonderment and surprise. He grinned, stretching the skin of his face tightly across his cheeks, and said, with wide eyes, from his heart, “I love nature!”
Well, that was worth the price of admission and I was pleased to be the facilitator. We counted two planets, one on either side of the moon, and watched the last few night stars twinkle faintly until they were covered by a blanket of blue sky. Someone’s lawn sprinkler made even the pavement smell good and gave the earth that fresh smell, like rain had fallen.
We walked slowly back to our house, let ourselves in, quietly crept into bed, and fell into that loveliest of sleep that only comes after an early morning foray into the world before the day has started.
No comments:
Post a Comment