By comparison

Seems as if there are mornings when it is not so much the light before dawn wandering through the window that speaks to me; some mornings I feel the earth turn. Like this one. Me, lying here below the skylight that opens to the morning star; lying here under clothes-line-dried sheets pulled to my chin.

Mornings such s this are more surely start-and-stop points than others; a beginning and an end simultaneously. The narrow, east-facing loft window opens to the horizon; and I wait. Wait, cuz at any second with the earth-spin, my bed and I will launch feet-first, smack into the light of day.

I thought of putting a window there while renovating my old place here on Slab Creek a few years back. Just so’s I could spot the days headed my way. Had that window and two matching others put in for the reasons I tell now, now from my groggy, here-nor-there, waiting-at the- horizon state.

It comes as a new, yet recognizable friend: this morning, as in when the breeze over yesterday’s cut-of-hay stirs with the lake and limestone drift, then shuffles with the land. And then the insistent robin’s call: Warning? Searching? Thanking the dew for its majesty? Red, my squirrel friend, treks across the roof that rests just above my head; he’s on his morning march. There’s a hings-to-do sorta rhythm to his patter and for sure he ain’t waitin’ for no sun to show. “What if it doesn’t?” he is sometimes heard to say.

Ta hell with Red. I hear a faraway sound of a choir spill through opened doors of a faraway chapel. It is Sunday, after all, but the prayer that enters my room mixes with the holiness of a sage smudge and coffee perking from the kitchen downstairs. I’m stayin’ put, driftin’ in the between-time. Ain’t movin’; No sirree; still lotta dreams to be netted. Not only that, betcha there’s nota- one who doesn’t know the tug firsthand; that gravity force that rams your head straight into the pillow a split-second faster than your mind can set the world in motion.

Slovenly, I say. But that’s ok. I can take slovenly. Especially this morning, the first day of summer. Yep the morning after the longest day: summer solstice. Then again, maybe it’s the wiccans calling; it’s not just summer; it really does feel like the first day of a new year.

Imagine that, sun set at 8:57 last evening, there churning in the spin disappearing in the westward mirror like hot embers of a cave dweller’s fire. Daysend— 931 minutes of daylight, longest day of the calendar year: But for me, a bookend.

A bookend as in opposite to the shortest day of the year: Recall the past winter equinox? A mere six months ago? A dandy: December 21, freezing rainstorm when every critter ducked for cover into the woods and pretty near everything slammed to a standstill when the grid shut down and hydro lines melted to the ground, and I remember the night for its silence: Complete, moonless-starless-black-ofnight- silence. Occurred to me quickly as I stood on the porch that night how, for our primal ancestors, winter solstice came to be called the ‘night of the dread’. Just like my sometimes cynical squirrel friend Red sez. What if the sun wasn’t coming back? Although I’ve never taken Red to be a heathen.

You see, back then in December, that past-winter no-hydro solstice night when I lit up the house with lanterns and candles and sipped pastis and played banjo because there was celebration to be had. Just because I didn’t lie-in the next morning: matter of fact, the trickster gods hurled me awake at 4 a.m. by bringing the lights back on. It occurred to me then that every day thenceforward would be getting longer, each one by approx three minutes as we inched our way out of the cold and dark of winter; the winter of grand snows and newly-minted weather speak. Gone down into camp-fire legend as the ‘big howl of oh thirteen’.

And so, here we are. We’ve arrived. We’re outta winter— sort of; we’ve crossed the pinnacle of natural light through a ground cloud of mosquitoes; longest day solstice: Now I figure as a bookend monument to these times, I’ll honour the garden sun with a cathedral- like window wall built of limestone blocks. A Stonehenge affair to mark the place where the sun may penetrate a rock face at eventide every June 21. Where all may enter; friends of the sun and moon and wild horses; of mountain peaks and valley creeks and wide, wide rivers. Yep, I think I’ll go with the turn-ofthe- earth as my calendar: Lets me lie-in a little while longer, driftin’ in the between-time.