Spring Morning on the Mountain
This is the greatest time of the year in my mind. Last night at 8 pm it was still 73 degrees Fahrenheit. This morning by the time I got around to looking the temperature was 61 degrees. A temperature range like that means we can actually enjoy the world around us. For us that means opening the door from our bedroom to the screen porch which adjoins it. That added to opening a couple of windows gives us a great cross flow of cool air, otherwise know as natural air conditioning.
When we lived in Canada, our houses never had air conditioning. It was not unusual to skip air conditioning in your car but we didn't, being from the south. So last night we slept with the doors open and the air blowing through our bedroom. No one's air conditioner was running to spoil the quiet of the evening. Only once in a while do we hear our wind chimes. Getting up in a room cooled by mountain breezes is one of my favorite things. Of course the first thing I always do is to head to the deck to check out the morning's sunrise. I am always surprised by how many different colors you can see in a single sun rise. It's not unusual for me to take fifty to one hundred pictures of a particularly nice sunrise. I try to leave them just as the camera captured them but sometimes the camera and my memory disagree so I might tinker a little with them but not very much. I only got to Photoshop to touch up scratched old photos. My skills there are just enough to be dangerous.
After the sunrise pictures, I haul our bird feeders out and hang them for the day. The raccoons have gotten so bad we have to take them in at night. Next I make the coffee. I'm a big fan of vacuum brewed coffee. We're currently using a Black & Decker model which the kids gave us. I see it now retails for $70. I think the coffee has more flavor. Our fancy European model gave up the ghost after less than a year. I also favor Dunkin Donuts coffee which I usually grind at home with about one quarter regular beans and the rest decaf. After all that I'm off to get the newspaper. These days since Randy, my neighbor, is traveling, I'm usually first in the newspaper paper box race. It seems the ladies on the hill, including Sara, Randy's wife, and Glenda, my wife, rarely manage to catch the sunrise.
After that I spend a few minutes reading e-mail and blog comments while the coffee is finishing brewing. Then I sit down and enjoy the morning newspaper. It's not that the news is any better than what I could read on the computer, it just feels more real when it is on paper and can't change with the next refresh of my browser. Of course my favorite part of the paper is the comics section. Right now my favorite comics are "Dilbert," "Frazz," and "Get Fuzzy." I especially enjoyed the Get Fuzzy trip to Canada last year. I'm convinced that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, used to work at Apple. If not he must have someone on the inside there. One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all times is the one where the pointed-haired boss tells Dilbert that he is going to fire the sales force and expect all the customers to drive to the warehouse and beg for products. If that's not Apple, we're in more trouble than I thought.
Only after the coffee, comes breakfast which I have pretty much always cooked for myself and whomever happens to wander into the kitchen. Usually I delay enough so Glenda and I can have breakfast together, but I have feeling the birds singing outside the bedroom door and the spring breezes are making it a little harder to get out of the cozy bed these days.
It only gets better when it is warm enough to have breakfast on the deck and cool enough to have a slow paced dinner with wine as night falls over the valley. It's pretty hard to fault this spot, though I would like a backyard that something besides a Mountain Goat could use. It's too bad I have to come back the real world before 9 am each morning. There's something to be said for ignoring the Washington Post and the New York Times and just enjoying these precious spring mornings. Summer will be here soon enough.
