© Another Day in the Country
How many folks that you know are up at dawn? If you are still in the channel of the working world, you probably know quite a few who are up at that hour of the morning.
In rural California, where I lived for almost 30 years, dawn was announced by an increase in the noise level — traffic noise. At around five in the morning, the number of cars driving down the winding road that traversed the curves of my mountain, began to build up until 7:30 when it hit its peak and tapered off until 9 o’clock.
These travelers were just getting to work and most didn’t give a hoot about dawn. They were just meeting the clock, attempting to beat the traffic build-up as they commuted to their work place.
When I came to Kansas, I threw out the alarm clock and noticed an accompanying quiet in Ramona’s early morning hours. There’s only one or two early morning commuters in my neighborhood with the most consistent noise accountable to motor vehicles coming on Tuesday morning when the trash man cometh.
Never being a dawn person, I’ve enjoyed my lifestyle in the country where I can wake at my leisure with sun in my eyes. The last time I remember being up to witness dawn was when we take Jana to the airport in Wichita — the first week of August.
While I see lots of wonderful sunsets, including the one last night that was ethereal and other-worldly due to all the dusty milo harvesting that is going on, I rarely witness dawn.
Compared to sunsets, I’ve always viewed the dawning day as low-key. The colors are soft and muted. They appear slowly, and then there’s this piercing light in your eyes that is almost blinding in its intensity and that’s it. It’s dawn and a new day is upon us with an endless to-do list.
Sunset, on the other hand, is rarely low-key in Kansas. Sunset is like a full blown orchestra, cymbals clashing with fire in the sky. Sunsets you can get lost in, looking directly at them, reveling in their beauty that lasts and lasts until even after the sun is gone. Sunsets are my thing. Being a night person, whose energy picks up as the day goes on, sunsets are a glorious reminder that I have time to do something wonderful before I go to bed.
Believe it or not, I met an artist a week or so ago, in a gathering of artists, where artists share what they do. We exchanged pleasantries, “I work in watercolor,” I said. “I do pastels,” she volunteered. “I paint the sunrise every morning.”
“You do what?” For this night person, a sunset lover, it was like meeting someone from Mars. “You are up before dawn every morning to paint?” To myself I was thinking, “What on earth could she be seeing to paint? Gray sky, turning to soft pinks and blues, a shining, blinding orb appearing. How redundant!”
“They are all different,” she chuckled, “and very beautiful. If it’s raining, I don’t paint, or if it’s just gray and you can’t see the sun.” Turns out that this artist has been painting the dawn for several years, every morning like clockwork. She puts a matt on her daily painting, adds the date, and files them away like a journal.
When folks found out what she was doing, there was a market for her work. Paintings of the dawn on a particular day are wonderful wedding presents, better for a grieving loved one than flowers, delightful birthday presents. Isn’t that amazing? It’s one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” kind of things, but naturally I wouldn’t think of that because I’m not up at dawn.
Just hearing about the artist up at dawn every morning has changed my life — not drastically but changed nonetheless. I’m more aware of dawn. (It helps that its’ coming after 7 o’clock these days). “I wonder what it looks like today?” I muse. “Maybe I should try it.” And then I yawn, adjust my pillow, pull up the sheet, and consider silently what I will write about on another day in the country.