Those awake at this hour are either blue-collared workers whose families are dependent on the inconvenient hours or those who didn’t expect to find themselves here. Granted, into the early Sunday morning, some are weathering the night’s drunk. Others are surprised – people who engaged in discussions or met someone with whom time slipped quietly past.

Across the neighborhood, lights come on randomly as the inhabitants of these houses stumble to find the way to the bathroom or to let a pet out into the yard. I was passing through the living room with a pre-dawn notion to pick up anything I’d missed earlier in the night with the children in my charge and before getting sidetracked with sleep and other matters.

If there is a time in this house when any of its dozen or more lifeforms can find peace, it’s just before the first light of day. The children, on occasion can fight off sleep until nearly midnight, no matter what activities their day has involved or their mood for the day. They are also prone to shouts in the dark either from night frights or sickness, drinks of water or help in the bathroom. The dogs keep their own schedule, though it mostly involves sleep. And, the same can be said for the cats, but they choose to move about the house corners when their enemies are wrapped in tight sleeping circles.

But 4 a.m., which comes without warning, seems to be a protected hour, untouchable by interruption. Something fills this hour (which may only be a few minutes at the top of 4) with its presence. The quiet can feel almost ominous though not intimidating. The slightest sound is amplied just as voices trun louder after a fresh snow. This is a gentle time and the one part of the day when even the lost souls come together and feel part of the world.

I wonder who is piloting the train barreling through town and rattling the houses awake? At dawn, the man at the helm is the only person with permision to speak.

Construction on the second phase of the Genesis Creek housing development began in 2006 in the pasture behind our house. The land was leveled, the trees were cleared and the quiet backcountry prairie was replaced with an immense brown field with fresh asphalt in the shape of two cul-de-sacs and one long neighborhood street poured down its middle.

Phase one, less than a block away, completed construction earlier in 2006. The first houses to come on the market were priced in the $250,000 range and sold liberally, at first, but slowed as other similar developments sprouted across town. Several homes were still available when phase two began later in the spring.

Two years later, the real estate market, the loan crisis, Wall Street turmoil and general instability has convinced the builders from starting construction on any more houses. The few that were underway were finished – the insides painted – and now the worker trucks have disappeared.

Only four houses have been built in Phase Two to date. One stands lonely on the asphalt circle, its porch light switched on day and night to ward off graffitists.

Nature is reclaiming the land where foundations haven’t been dug yet. Feather-topped weeds sprouted this fall as the Earth has begun to heal itself. Earlier in the summer, wild sunflowers swept across the clearing, some standing more than eight feet tall and looming over the empty streets with pock-marked faces.

Progess is inevitable, I’ve been told, but I wish the stalling market could have been forecasted sooner – before the land was scarred for more houses. This argument probably holds little weight as I look out and wish all this from a house built in the same pasture once kept by a different owner. But the house was nearly 10 years old when we bought it and it very definitely was needed. We would have been displaced without it.

I think now about the wild life and the trees that were pushed away or killed by the land-scraping equipment. I am far from an environmentalist and only a partial tree hugger. Seeing this progress, though, or lack thereof, makes me regret my decision to buy a plot in a newer neighborhood when an older home would have done just as fine.

I won’t make that mistake again. I wish I could say the same for developers.

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.

The mailbox posts leave deep shadows into the streets. Almost-too-lazy-to-live dandelions poke up in yards that were mowed days ago, and even they have given up on summer. Children play in bedrooms and carry toys from room to room. Their sweet laughter and voices aren’t that dissimilar to bird song on this morning that the even the most cynical part of me would describe as glorious.

Birds swoop above the rooftops and a cat crosses the street devoid of traffic or any visible life. I could step back in time in this ancient town that is still rattled by coal cars, that in most places still smells of livestock, whose downtown district stands on narrow steets laid atop land once scarred with horse and buggy impressions.

This is a town still populated with old white-washed barns with old rusted metal heaped under trees with bare lumber that would easily burn, but just lays in the shade rotting. Country lanes and driveways are still lined with cock-a-burrs that catch in the coats of hunting dogs and cats abandoned in the fields.

There’s an antique airport with big hangars that houses barnstormerd and war planes from the 40s. They fly overhead twice a summer on Saturday mornings for an air show that materializes without any publicity or great marketing. The buzz of the engines fill the out of doors with perpetual buzzing. Even the sidewalks and parked cars hum with engine noise providing all the napping children with soft background music.

These are long days when the weather is like this because they feel as though they have been lived before.

Now, back in the present, the metallic rattle and distant train whistles start up again and run throughout the day, here, every day, but most the people here are not atune to the sensations any more.

The tracks a mile or so away manage to rattle the plumbing and the foundations in the cookie cutter neighborhoods, and sometimes I wish they’d crumble to the ground so we’d have to go back living in a simpler way.

Down the street past the stop sign’ a farmer with a potbelly unloads a tractor from the trailer he pulled behing the giant extended-cab truck parked in the street. He starts the engine, which pierces the soft afternoon rustling of leaves by the steady wind and drives it up the slanted driveway to an opwn garage door. He leaves it there and climbs back in the pick-up to the sounds of American flags beating in the wind.

His Ford 4×4 has a hemi engine in it, which makes it sound as though it were as strong as a diesel, and with its poor gas mileage, he takes it back to the farm and the endlessness of Kansas farm fields that are left unprotected and unshadowed to burn in the direct sunlight today.

My own body has been heated to a deep tan. My arms and chest are mocha-colored, far from the ivory white of last spring. I’ve completed my chores for the day and sit in relaxed judgment of the outside world now. Of all the 50 states in the union, I doubt the world expects anyone or anything beautiful to come out of these farm fields and rolling prairies, but on days when the well seems especially filled with words and the right language, I find that the world, as beautiful and miserable as it can be … can be wrong.

I imagine the people behind the closed screendoors – inside these air-conditioned palaces are sitting down to eat apple pie for dinner tonight on tables ripe with freshly picked beets and string beans grown in backyards or picked up at roadside vegetable stands. Kansas, long fogotten in the eyes of the nation, a red state deep-dyed in its support of the elephant party, dependable for the way it votes and blind to the candidates as long as they are Republican.

Hot in the summer, as dry as a desert but more humid thanks to thw rivers that cut wide swaths throught the northeast, deep and brown. Kansas, where some men still where denim overalls, John Deer caps and rise in the early morning hours before anyone else to carry lanterns into dark fields, milk cows they are completley carless about and spend Saturday mornings in greasey fork-and-spoon cafes where people are still allowed to smoke. And all in all, they know what an important role they play in food supply.

I can smell faintly the backyard barbecue grills firing up as the dinner hour approaches. The streets are empty of children and men tuning motorcycles, and ladies waterinf plants. Cars swish by leaving a wake in this thick and humid afternoon and for a split second, I remember myself as a child playing at the base of a cigar tree ibn my grandmother’s back yard. Kansas, timeless and not forgotten, at least not for me.