Pre-Dawn Sounds on a January Morning

Well before the first hint of dawn, I listen to the sounds our house makes in the night.  The whirring of an overhead fan.  The purring of a portable air purifier.  And just barely audible, radio voices on KBIA, programmed to connect us automatically at 5:30 a.m. to NPR and the world. Click. The thermostat register in the hallway checking its own temperature, set at 65 degrees for the night.  Clink. Ice dropping onto a pile of cubes in the refrigerator’s freezer bin.

Then one more sound catches my attention.  Unfamiliar, it’s curious enough to have me leave the warmth of our down comforter, wool top blanket and Kit to find its source.  But first, I slip my bare feet into chocolate-colored high topped, fleece-lined Ugg boots—replacements for my old pair purchased in New Zealand several decades before the fashion world decided that these wooly boots from Down Under were in fact not so ugg-ly after all.

Ignoring traditional house robes, I opt for a warm, oatmeal-colored, oversized sweater that almost reaches my knees and add a sleeveless fleece-lined vest the color of Burmese garnets.  Catching my image in the glass porch door, my white pajama pants float beneath the sweater and vest like the traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez.  For an instant, I see my beautiful sisters Molly and Kim in the late 1970s.  Dressed in traditional pajama-like pants and long tops, they are wrapped in cashmere pashmina shawls as a cold dawn rises over the ancient city of Gabedero in Sindh Province, Pakistan.

Focused again on that unidentified sound, I follow it into the warming room where I discover that the fan switch on the front of the Buck stove has been blowing all night over hot embers stowed under a pile of gray ash.  Sifting under the pile, I uncover two live shards of last night’s fire, add twigs and a small piece of split wood.  Soon, I have fire humming back to life in the stove. “Thank you, Dad,” I say aloud, “for teaching me to bank embers when putting a fire to bed at night.”

One final sound comes from my memory. It is the remembered sound of a cat scratching at the basement door recalled from some winter past.  Fanny, our sharp-eared calico Manx, must have heard me padding around.  And while it may have been dark outside, the morning was underway as far as she was concerned. Once released into the kitchen, it was her habit to weave in, around, and just ahead of my feet—a feline skater executing a perfect figure 8 on our cold linoleum floor—until the tinny-tight snap of a tuna can opening was detected.

By then, Kit was in the kitchen ready to drop an espresso coffee pod into the Nespresso machine, pour milk into the frothing machine, and push the button to activate the steam.  Hot water runs through dark coffee in the pods drip, drip dripping dark brown into the mug below.  By then, Fanny would have been on the couch purring during the first of many naps during her last year with us.

In this first winter without cats in our lives, we walk during the pre-dawn hour, listening to the sounds of our neighbors’ cattle, chickens and horses.  Once back at the house, Kit prepares our coffee or chai latte tea, and we head back outside to the rattan couch on the porch where we watch squirrels, rabbits and birds munch birdseed and harvest pumpkin pulp from what remains of the Halloween pumpkins. 

Pre-dawn. It is my favorite hour of the day.  In touch with the house and its living, breathing sounds, I’m fully awake and at peace.  A plaid, wool lap blanket, and memories still fresh of our cat Fanny conspire to keep me warm. In the silence, my thoughts are transported to the rich cast of characters in two books by author Michael Ondaatje.

In Ondaatje’s loosely autobiographical novel, “The Cat’s Table,” an eleven-year-old boy journeys unaccompanied on a ship from Ceylon to England in 1954. Like the boy in the novel, the author left Ceylon as a child on a ship to join his mother who had left for England earlier.  At age nineteen, Ondaatje moved to Canada to complete his studies, ultimately became a Canadian citizen.

In a travel memoir, “Running in the Family”—written when Ondaatje was in his early 40s—he reconnected with his eccentric Ceylonese/Dutch family and the island’s lush landscape.  In his memoir, the writer describes a peacock’s disturbed cry when awakened from its perch high in the trees.  Recalling that sounds in his description, I’m instantly linked through memory to a mysterious peacock on a walkabout that spent a night in a walnut tree at our former Breakfast Creek home.  

Just then, as light spills from Ondaatje’s pen over the flaming tropical flamboyant trees of his native Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), dawn finally emerges like a giant apricot half a world away.   At Boomerang Creek, January has just gotten underway.