Cold Morning

Winter has arrived at the desert, at least at night time. In the early mornings, such as now, I could almost think I'm back in Kansas. Almost. Usually I set my alarm for 5:30, but when the time comes, I turn off the ringer and lie awake with the covers pulled closer, occasionally drifting into sleep then jerking myself awake, afraid that I've overslept.

Then the sun finally climbs over the Rincon Mountains to the east, and the temperature creeps up--into the 70s today they say. I get up, wake my wife, and we begin the daily bustle, the circuit of food-work-tv-sleep again.

It seems, sometimes, that everything happens so slowly. It feels, sometimes, that on any given day, nothing will change, that in 10 years I will be in this same place with these same questions and concerns and insecurities. Or that new ones will have taken their place. As with the rounds we used to sing in elementary school where we each come in at different moments but sing the same lines over and over and over again, I feel as though I've heard the words before I even open my mouth.

But this morning, instead of staying in my warm bed, next to my wife, I climbed out, pulled on my robe. I moved around the house in the darkness so deep the air itself seemed to have a texture of grainy blue. I sat down here, as I've been meaning to do for months now, and started to write, even though I stared at the computer screen and checked the celebrity gossip and looked at the weather and browsed NBA scores for 45 minutes first.

Today, something changed. Maybe tomorrow, something will too. Maybe soon, it will begin to get warmer.