Morning Embroidery

People that you didn't know existed appear; an older man wheeling laundry in a shopping cart, a young man carrying a paper plate of toaster waffles to his car.  Who are these people?  Two neighbors I hadn't seen in months were just as surprised to see me with "I thought you moved" expressions.

It's a different world at 5:30 a.m. in winter, in the dark.  The sky had changed from streetlight punctuated midnight to the dull blue which announces the impending dawn.  Is there a word for the changing color, that one existing between the sepulcherious black where you can't see your own hand and the rising light of blended gold and rose?  Dawn is the part with colors, as far as I know, but if you've ever driven through night and into the morning day, the switch to that deep blue prior to the glow of pre-sun atmosphere is as welcome as the thought of toast and eggs.

I saw the pre-dawn this morning, while sitting in the back of Addisu's taxi.  Terrestrially, a few Christmas lights hung in windows of houses, and one creche was already in full shepherd, for the season is upon some of us.

Surgery had been scheduled at six freaking fifteen, and we got there amid quiet streets; the people that were up had business to tend, there was no hesitation in their walk, they were getting into the buildings which held their assigned roles.  Mine was of patient with a stack of filled out forms set to hand in, yet the clarity of morning air pulled me as a sea anchor, changing the purpose temporarily from medicine to breathing the morning air as yet untouched by the sun.

Night air was once considered poisonous, a miasma filled with decomposed matter that brought disease and rot from organic debris, including that which wafted up from the buried in the cemetery.  Breathe that stuff in, and you're asking for trouble, said the early 19th century.  To me, there is less clutter at night, when the cooling air staunches whatever effluvium has been warmed by the sun; oil on the pavement, dumpsters, something sticky.  The air at night has less caustic abracadabra and fills you with clear draughts of oxygenated energy, waking a far away human traveling with their pack.

Everything went well, and they wheeled me out, still quite jolly from the IV; I love anesthesia.
Golden people that melted into golden puddles filled the time spent under; no, I have no idea.  Back home, I slept.

But these folks, the ones on a different time schedule yet exist at the same address, the ones I never see; this is intriguing, like crepuscular animals who blend back into the bushes at daylight.  I guess it works that way, and has ever since time became more than a rising moon.

Sleep in complete darkness if you can, it allows the deepest level of sleep to lengthen, for we are wired to respond to light.  Breathe in the night air.  Burrow. Warm.  Heal.