At 6, the shadows from cars slant severly into lawns and across driveways. Mailboxes become three times larger and grow so tall until the sun reaches a high point, and the shape has to start over again.

One bird flies low through the sky’s rich color, nothing but a shadow itself, across the rooftops and sets down some place in the darkness. Windows begin to light in the houses and in many instances they are the lights in children’s rooms, whose expectations for the day are too great for them to sleep. They shake awake in the same disbelief that adults do, except the misunderstanding is that they can’t believe they ever fell asleep at all (not a stupor that it’s time for the day to begin). They find the light switches so that they can read or play with the dolls they fell asleep with until they hear a parent rise for the first morning bathroom visit or to make coffee.

All the while, the clocks tick out the time, and every moment in everyday has a purpose. In the night, I could hear them in places I don’t ordinarily notice. Across from me on the mantle, on a ledge in the bathroom, high on the wall in the basement, ticking, the arms jutting through the glass, keeping the rhythm, the beat for the day, and unrelenting in the practice. Slowly the hands move around, always circular, never in any other direction, the day a big dizzy loop that comes full circle in the spin. Hands rotate atop one another, always counting heard or otherwise.

The sliver that is the moon is almost completely disappeared. Now the sky is much more optimistic, the gray turned golden, blues softer and not as though about to turn darker for an impending storm. If the moon did disappear, the children woukd be the first to see it, playing silhouetted in the dead room light growing brighter and brighter, the features in their toys becoming more defined and the shadows beneath their own noses disappearing. Crescent moon, dissolving to nothing, sahring the sky, the sun as much as it likes to cast them, does not have a shadow of its own and no dark side, the way you do. Sleeping dogs who lie down before their masters, wake last, lieing at the foot of empty beds, delaying the first steps into the cold morning air or worse being confined to freezing backyards by owners who forget how cold it is actually. Now the sun has risen tall enough that it somes in high through the windows onto be spreads and open carpet, lights the hair of children who still lie sleeping in their beds. These are loft developments, and while it may not seem the traditoinal path that midwesterners are familiar with in homes and farm expanses, the intricacies are the same, the people with more similarities than contrasts, and the loves they keep the same, a love for animals, for children, for sunrises and for making a way for themselves. Where they live, the buildings are taller, the saphalt thicker and more common, but lives equally fragile and deep and complex. The sin shines on everyone and it’s never more apparent than here, the city, where some building’s light on comes to particular places, but it always comes.

Between the bushes is a cherry tree that sheds its leaves at autumn’s first notion and a dried up bird bath holding scattered seed spilled from the feeder. Smudged droppingsn which are the malfeasances of the summer birds, have been partially washed away by the fall rain. The finches that return to the branches every November are much more polite and choose to do their business elsehwere. When it snows, the birdbath is the first object to collect a fresh white mound and soft but barren place for the birds to sit in line and watch the snow fall.

Last winter, I’d rise at 5 or 6 to write at the dining room table sometimes chronicling the details or events I saw on our block. Most mornings, I was kept company by the miniature birds landing in the bushes and tree branches in great swarms. My wife would spread handfuls of seed up the sidewalk and into the lawn and they’d shove their noses deep into the snow banks to collect their food. From the first day the food was scattered, they made a stop at our house and the scarred fluttering a first step in their daily routine.

But in the rush of this year and the obligations cause people with home mortgages to focus attention to “more meaningful” things, I’d forgotten to keep look out for the birds. Yesterday morning, I awoke at the early hour that I used to write and found the world outside to be as calm and blue as it normally is before the house lights come up. I’ve been able to develop a more flexible writing schedule during the last few months, not so dependent on rising to beat the noise and clutter that accompanies daily family life.

I ate breakfast and got dressed in the quiet morning as I always do. Before leaving for work, I started my car in the driveway and went back inside to wait for it to warm. When I passed by the bushes in that place, I set off an unexpected explosion. I hadn’t noticed that they’d returned, many of the same birds from last winter I suspect, back in a great horde of brown and loud, flapping wings.

Whatever the day had in store for me, which I’ve soon forgotten, I wanted to put aside immediately and return to my place at the dining room table to write about my old friends. Their year has taken them to a great many places, as mine has, and we have a lot stories to share together this winter.

Conversation is not a gift that three- and five-year-olds possess. After a few minutes, the talk dwindles and soft steps move toward the stairs. On most mornings, the pair comes down to the living room half-naked with footed fleece pajamas partially unzipped and their wet diapers flung out on their bedroom floor. This morning, the boy pulls a blanket three times his height down the stairs behind him. Draped around his head, he is the morning Wiseman rehearsing for a Christmas play. He has removed his pajama bottoms but not his shirt, and, upon reaching the living room, swaddles himself and his sister into a place on the couch.

Light has come to another day, the great triumph over dark that will gradually gives way to dark again. Children are oblivious to the sun and the moon battling in eternal tragedy, a fight that ends with one temporary victor at dusk and at dawn, but ultimately ends a draw. Something inside them, though, draws their bodies from sleep and to bed at the same hour of the day. Before the proprietors of other houses on the street have read fresh newspapers or brewed coffee, our children are awake.

These “strangers,” as they would dub them, do not yet realize it’s daylight. The house fronts are dark. The entire street is bathed in blue light. The only movement on the block is an idling front porch swing, but otherwise the wind is holding its breath. Flags dangle flaccidly from flag posts. Subtle layers of frost on car windows await the soft sunshine to turn them to beaded jewelry.

Outside the thin window glass bird song is drowned out by a train whistle, then the outdoor morning is returned to them. Singing from bare branches, seated in nests they built that withstood October gales and November rains. One glides above the stained glass window in the dining room – wings narrowed and level – shattering the painting of sky behind it. Gangs of finches swoop from bird feeder to bird feeder placed in the front yard bushes, until something sets them off, and lift together a few feet in the air, then return to their original places as nervous as they were and yet feeling as though they’d escaped something.

At 7:30, the children are already excited. Their mother comes downstairs and starts the coffee. She puts cinnamon rolls into the oven to bake while the children lift small spoons from cereal bowls at the dining room table. The light in the room is softened by stained glass, by the tree outside the window and the shadow cast by the rise of the house across the street. They dip their fingers into the frosting as their energy spreads through the house as fully as the oven even fills the kitchen with its heat. They were the first to rise and the first to push into the world another time.

Like the autumn’s last birds, our children sing the first song of the day.

This was the scenery the previous morning, too – visibility suddenly shrunken, houses down the long street hidden behind the clouds and the block suddenly ended. The windows in parked cars steamed as though by breath but in actuality a symptom of the cool glass against even cooler temperatures. Eventually, the clouded windows beaded as the morning deepened and then evaporated in direct sunlight.

Tomcats left out for the night sleek up the sidewalks onto porch stoops and wait for doors to open. The mist around them distorts their size so that they move with the same cunning and bravery as lions.

Meanwhile, the sad housecats stare forlornly out into the development contemplating all that they missed in the dark rows between houses and the gray farm fields nearby where the mice play safe from birds of prey that can swoop down and carry them back to nests. The mice realize they are free from the pesky house cats that look out from behind glass like angry animals at the zoo.

Rotting jack-o-lanterns sit on stairs and porches from two nights ago. Candles burned inside them to a heated-gut smell that went out over the lawns and in through screendoors that were left open on an unseasonably warm night for trick-or-treating. But as the night progressed, those doors were drawn closed, as the same pets were left to roam the cold night with the rot coming down around them.

Now the sun moves closer to its place and the fog begins to lift. The temperatures are cool spring-like cool and will stay so until, rather immediately, around 10, it will be warmer. Jackets will be shed and long sleeves pushed up to the elbow.

Let out through backdoors, the neighborhood dogs round the morning fences to find a place in the yard to soil and then another patch to settle in as the morning becomes day. Water bowls that were set out for these dogs yesterday and were entirely lapped up are not filled with shallow dew.

In trees above the dogs and the mice, robins sing as they did in spring, this late autumn weather similar feeling to it was then. As the planet leans away from the sun and the Earth crosses back through the same angle as it does temporarily in early spring, the birds are confused during the two weeks of lovely weather. The only difference in seasons is that soon it will turn deathly cold, their nests are not new, they too will soon be abandonded while everything around them dies and grows cold.

Coffee brews in the pots around the enshrouded neifhborhood. Children uo nefore the sun rose play quietly in beds with their most recent toys making up imaginary caverns and palaces in their bedsheets. The fathers sit and read the newspapers or help the mothers with breakfast. Soon the rush to chirch will begin, all the children must be clothed quickly and through God’s grace somehow avoid getting pancake syrup or spilled juice on sleeves or jackets.

Off by the industrial area, the tracks whistle with passing trains. The light turns golden as it raises above the houses and now the early morning fog is gone tntirely. Soon, the families will be outside in the yards and the house animals inside or in their appropriate places, one type of animal exchanged for another and the day underway.

I rose just as the outside was turning from purple to blue and, it was in this shade that I found the cupboards as empty as old Mother Hubbard’s. My disappointment, though, was secondary to the hunger the sleeping bodies upstairs would feel upon waking. Ten minutes later, I had already returned to the still-slumbered children and the dark, cool rooms.

I’d come back in the frontdoor with the morning newspaper under my arm, a jug of milk and a bag of food in the other. The cats were angry that I hand’t fed them so I poured some nuggets from a dusty bag into their food bowls. I sat alone at the dining room table oblivious to the light or the quiet and ate shredded wheat while scanning the day’s headlines that are really news from the day before.

Quiet or a sense of calm aren’t ordinary here during the week. These moments have to be stolen. There are no backwoods with trees and feathery weed clumps to crouch behind and lose yourself like I did what I was a child. I remember making a pledge to myself to stay young my whole life – young at heart – and it’s a promise I’ve kept and a time recreated through my children’s lives.

One autumn morning on a Saturday like this, a friend that was sleeping over and I rose, dressed in warm clothes and went up on the hillside that stretched behind my home and others on the street. We buried oursleves in leaves while watching green house workers load big trucks. The children on the block were a concern to the nursery owners though we never did any harm to them, but they would often shout threats across the barbed wire fence and run us off when they could.

So it was easy that morning to create our own sense of fear of what these men might do to us of we were spotted in the red and brown dropped leaves. If I’d known the fears of adulthood then – the creditor on the doorstep, the unpredictable economy, corporate cutbacks not tied to performance but market direction, I would have abandoned those thoughts for something less serious or even cheerful.

But what we did was lay still and I eventually roamed those hillsides so often I would expect the trees and the bushes there still remembr me. The branches we climbed, the thorny vines that grew up the bark in one groping of trees, I can remember in the clarity of this day. The homemade steps my neighbor cut into the hillside so her elderly legs could traipse up and down its face with a garden hose watering the seeds she’d dropped into the soil churned with burned charcoal from the rail line that come through our backyards as long ago as Eden. We kids would occasionally pull up an old rusted railroad spike with wonderment and contemplate its value, which to us was priceless.

I should have known then I was destined for the writer’s life, to be haunted by detail and the world I see, constantly running the issues and events through my own personal filter, and yet being strangely undamaged and unimpressed by most of it and yet again still managing to live passionately, to bring new life here.

The passion is harder gotten at dawn. If I can prod myself from the covers at 5:30, I’m cognizant of a point when the dawn seems as though it might actually break – hold itself right as it is, the sky only a shade brighter than night and yet expecting of the heat, like a pan set on a cold burner.

I was so eager to join the day today, out early the way I’d been as a boy, my appearance halfway presentable with sleepy hair matted down by palm-fulls of water. I’d put on the rumpled clothes I’d worn the day before and left on the bathroom floor where I’d undressed: a flannel shirt with a mock turtleneck portruding from the collar. My pajamas were still inside my jeans as though a hollow man was wearing them, a very careful scarecrow who’d not left behind a single straw.

Every evening I promise to myself to rise early, to record my thoughts when the day is the most peaceful, but I sleep through the alarm, just an imitation writer amond the rows of Kansas corn and wheat – the sleep making my intentions to write as distant as my childhood.