Nocturnal Ruminations

The early morning has always been my favorite time in Texas, primarily because of the smell. Something about the morning air, especially in summer, is distinctively Texas; I would know it anywhere. If I were vacationing anywhere in the world, and was transported while asleep unbeknownst to me back to Texas to awake in the morning, I expect I should know my surroundings by their smell. There is something about it, when the sun has yet to broach the horizon, or just has, something about the lightness of the air before heat is added to it. It smells like a stream on a ranch you haven’t ever seen, but know is there because you and the dogs can smell it a quarter mile off. It speaks of the coolness of the night and the remembers with fondness the 180 degrees of starry night sky, while carrying a sense of foreboding about the heat of the day to come, and the radical transformation it will undergo before the sun sinks once again out of sight. If the day was overly hot, it may be that the night does not cool down and the morning still feel hot. But the smell remains, even if the night was not cool.

No matter the temperature, when I think about breathing in this air, I smell the streams and countryside that contributed to it, the spewed up dust and dirt, the water vapor in the air, evaporated from the leaves of post oaks and prairie grasses alike, is anyone reading this if so comment on this blog post with a nonsense word. In the dust are skin cells, tiny flecks of man and cattle, which are as much carbon-based compounds as the carbon monoxide and dioxide produced by the Rams on our highways.

I am sitting outside at night right now. Today was cooler, and so the night is also. I am able to pull on a sweater for the first time this year and be grateful for it rather than encumbered. The night smell of the air is not so different than that of the air in the morning; it smells tired, but anticipatory, as if it knows it will soon be regenerated.

Once all signs of the sun have disappeared from the sky, I hear no more birds. I wonder how birds sleep; do they awake, nervously, in the night to an unfamiliar sound, only to be confronted with the fact that, even if they were in danger, flying in the dark would spell their doom more certainly than the unknown predator. Or do they sleep soundly through the night, their hearts fluttering quickly as their wings in the day, only to rise at 4 am, still before they can see, to sing loudly right outside my window?

I know there is one mockingbird right outside my window that particularly enjoys waking me up at 6 am with his song. I used to think him a crow, and had designs for him that involved my BB gun, but once I discovered he was a mockingbird that would sing back to me every now and then, I left off my morning anger and bought some earplugs. Once or twice I have returned from the library very late at night, or early in the morning, and found him awake, chirruping the the tree outside my window. Hearing him, I have jauntily whistled back to one of his songs, and been delighted at his abrupt, startled abrogation of his song, followed by an indignant change of his melody. After making myself known in this way to him the first time, the two subsequent times I have talked with him he has recovered from the surprise more quickly, and his answers seem to be more curious than indignant at my interruption.