Sunrise, Sunset

I was up early this morning. Seventy-thirty. It's not the crack of dawn early, granted, but early for a Saturday. I find this is happening to me more and more. I don't like staying up late (I can't!), and my internal alarm has become quite reliable for not allowing me to sleep in.

Why is this? Why is it that we wake earlier and sleep less as we get older? My mother, for example, regularly conks out at eight o'clock and wakes up at four in the morning. Is it that she needs less sleep? She's certainly not burning any less energy: this woman does 18 holes of golf, makes dinner, and then goes out dancing. (My father is game for all of it, but he'll happily stay in bed until the cry has gone up from below that the only thing standing between zen perfection and total chaos in the layout of the living room is a large piece of furniture needing to be moved.)

When my mother began being awake in the earliest hours, she had to find some things to do that didn't wake everyone else up. Fortunately, my mother lives in a heavenly place half the year, on a beach in Nova Scotia. The beach and the front windows of my parents' house face north. If you look eastward down the beach on any morning of the year, you will see the sun rise over the dark shore at Arisaig, its rays first illuminating a scraggly, splendidly scenic lone pine that clings to the bluff on the eastern end of my folks' property. The view is so reliably pretty - it's like having a landscape model sit for you - that my mother took up photography. She has taken many great photographs of the sunrise on Melmerby: I am looking at the one in my kitchen even now. The sky is cerise! Vermilion! Magenta! That sentinel pine stands dark and stoic against bad weather and other intruders. It's a beautiful picture, framed like a Group of Seven. My mother has an eye.

In addition to recording the sunrise, my mother is also up and about when the natural world starts its day. The beach house is bordered on one side by a pond with marsh around it; on the other side by homes and scattered woods. Consequently, the backyard at the beach is practically a commuter highway for all sorts of creatures returning home from a good night's scavenging. Raccoons, skunks, beavers, hares, porcupines, and dear little deer, who, god love them, have somehow managed to keep a year-long home in the marsh. And there are birds galore, seabirds, robins, woodpeckers, finches, bald eagles. When I go to stay at the beach, my mother often regales me with breakfast tales of what she saw trundling along on the back lawn that morning. Impossible birds and beasts. I wouldn't be surprised if she caught a unicorn out there.

Although my mother jokes about her dead-hour meanderings, this time she spends alone with the world and her thoughts have become not just special, but important to her. She has become a philosopher and an artist, the kind of person who has learned to appreciate the smallest, loveliest moments of each day, making them her own, sharing them with us. As she gets older, my mother spends more and more time on her own, puttering around in the dark, yet at the same time, I feel closer to her than ever before. She's calmer and clearer, and in no particular rush.

That's what I make of our bodies' propensity to get us up early as we age. It's as if we sense that as our own days get shorter, the days of the world must be lengthened and slowed down for our in-the-moment enjoyment of them. Conveniently, it isn't until we get older, many of us, that we have the wisdom to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us: Slow down! Look around! Be here now.

At 7:30 this morning, I made my way up the stairs to the kitchen. The light was lovely: a golden morning with a hint of warmth even though it's the third of March and there's a pile of snow on the ground. The cat, as usual, was yelling her head off to be let out. When I opened the back door for her, I heard a bird call that I've never heard before. It was a melancholy whistle, keee-ya-oh!, about the pitch of a mourning dove but more "whistly". I looked up into my neighbour's tree and there was a Red-Tailed Hawk, a female. She was thirty feet from me, calling for a mate in an alley in downtown Toronto. I ran into the house for my camera and managed to snap a quick picture of her. It's kind of blurry and there's an unnattractive electrical cable cutting off her feet. It's definitely not up to my mother's caliber.

I have much to learn, I guess. But all my solitary mornings to do it in.