good morning

Every morning the sun rises through these still-green hills right up over our East-facing bedroom window. Long before it actually cracks the horizon and soaks our room golden the cats furiously purr and knead my slumbering body. Nick and I have an unspoken arrangement of a tradeoff for who lets out the chickens in the morning. The other gets to sleep in an extra 30 minutes and to Top It Off they get their choice of coffee or tea in bed. Today was my morning to serve.  In an unprecedented bout of planning I had us put the chickens in garden for a couple of days. After they have scratched and pecked and eaten the left over kale and the fallen tomatoes and deposited as much poop as their little bodies can muster we will put them back on pasture and replace them with the pigs to finish the garden job. Manure and tilling and garlic prep all through the power of animals. Its a glorious thing.

So, this morning, it was I who lay, body still, eyes open, in wait for sunrise. The cats had long since woken me but I refused to rise until that impossible sun rose even with our window sill. When he did, I pulled my used body from the unbelievable warmth of the blankets, put on my long wool underwear and one of Nick's sweatshirts and my muck boots and poured the cats, Rudy, and myself out into the coolness of today's sunrise. While it always seems insurmountable, getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning, there is nowhere I would rather be than there, with those chickens and their unabashed enthusiasm for life. It always reminds me of this photo I snapped one morning on the farm in North Carolina.