2 minute read
MINSKY'S MUSINGS: Morning
Morning
Aired on Cape Cod Notebook , WCAI Radio, on August 29, 2021.
By Dennis Minsky
This is the hour nobody owns: the break of day, just about dawn. The vast majority of people are in their beds. It is the best time to be alone in a crowded, hectic summertime world.
And it is the best time to be with our wild brethren. The animal world is most active and most free now. The night-time sojourners make their last rounds before retiring for the day: deer, fox, weasel, raccoon, owl. The day birds are the quintessential early risers: their first songs precede the breaking of light. They celebrate the night’s end and the beginning of another day. They celebrate survival. They will take the rising sun’s energy, transformed into seeds and insects, and translate it into feathers- and song. What is song, but pure, unalloyed joy? In an hour or two these same birds will skulk in the bushes, but now they are more visible and active on our lawns, decks, and patios. They stroll and hop along roadsides and even in the middle of the mostly empty streets.
Light steals gently, inexorably, into the dawn sky, creating a quiet revolution. Shade by shade, it nullifies the darkness. In this mild early morning light everything looks kinder, gentler. Things begin to appear and take shape. Across the Harbor I see Long Point Lighthouse, an alabaster pillar against the sky, and a few boats resting on their moorings. Down on the beach it is especially quiet. In the absence of noise, silence takes on a power of its own. Footsteps in the sand are muffled, as if admonished. Gulls fly in the gray overhead with wings that row through the air without a sound.
The tiny fingers of the tide creep blindly, boldly, across the flats- a promise returned. There is the beginning of a faint trickling sound. Tiny grains of sand tumble over each other in a light breeze, without so much as a pardon-me. So small, but resolute- they know they built this peninsula.
