Day!
I’ve been getting up with the crack of dawn voluntarily lately in an attempt to beat the heat. The dog needs her daily constitutional, and the garden needs to be watered. It’s been blazin’ assed hot lately and there’s no way I could get the dog’s run done in the evening – by the time it is cool enough to be safe to take her out, it’s too dark to be safe to take her out. As to watering the garden, some of these really scorching days, it gets a drink at sunrise and sunset.
As a result, the tomatoes are looking absolutely gorgeous and everything else seems to be doing pretty well.
Here’s Ruby on Friday morning, doing her post-piddle victory dance. Sometimes, after she has marked over somebody else’s wee, she does this ridiculous little victory dance wherein she paws the ground, one foot at a time, then prances around the area in a circle. I’ve seen other dogs do it, and it never fails to crack me up.
When I was a kid, about 11 or 12, I guess, I was really into getting up to watch the sunrise. I’d wake up crazy early, when the sky was only just starting to turn grey, and watch the sun edge its way up over the horizon. It was a bit of a thrill to see that first tiny orange sliver come into view. Given the ambient dust in Western Nebraska, the sunrises and sunsets are often really quite glorious.
A Kansas City sunset, 7-4-08.
Often, after the sun was up, but before it started to get hot, I’d go off for a ramble in the neighboring pastures, and take the family dog with me as a companion. I’d leave a note for Mom by the coffee pot, but plan to be back before the rest of the family was up. In the just-after-dawn cool, the rough, yellowing prairie grasses riffling in the continual wind gave off a sweet, nutty scent. There were small rabbits for the dog to chase, colorful wildflowers to pick and bring back to Mom, and the shallow, sandy Niobrara river to wade in. The dog and I would often follow along the river bank for as long as I figured was sensible, stopping to go down and wade, to chuck cow-chips in, or to look in the stagnant shallows for crawdads, planarian worms, and good, slimy moss.
You might be mistaken into thinking that I’m a morning person. I heartily dislike having to use my actual brainmeats until after at least 9:00 a.m., and with the aide of a fair quantity of coffee even then. Don’t get me wrong; I like being up early, but I like being up early, on my own terms.