Daylight?

Last month I poured coffee onto the kitchen floor. I needed that coffee. I couldn’t wake up without it. The coffee stayed on the floor while I sipped the second attempt, the coffee that made it into the cup.

I’m finding it harder with each passing year to get up early. It seems like only a few years ago I was up at 5 a.m. to write for an hour before heading off to teach that 8 a.m. class. Now I struggle to pull myself out of bed at 6 a.m. and pour coffee on the kitchen floor. It doesn’t seem to matter when I go to bed, but ever the optimist, I keep pushing my bedtime earlier and earlier. Before long I’ll have to skip dinner altogether. Still, my body refuses to cooperate, my brain resists waking up, and my soul begs to wait for the first hints of daylight to sneak around the edges of the bedroom curtains before body, brain and soul pull together to drag me out of bed.

And then daylight savings time arrives. Just as the mornings are beginning to brighten and getting out of bed seems a tiny bit easier. Just as the coffee hits its mark in the cup on the first try and I manage to remember the day of the week as I lie on the living room floor doing my morning stretches, we "spring forward" into another hour of morning darkness.

My husband hands me a second cup of morning coffee and in that calm rational tone used with the mentally deranged he tells me that I’ll appreciate the extra daylight in the fall. It doesn’t help. Like a petulant child, I pout. I want it now, I tell him. I want 6 a.m. to be 6 a.m. I want daylight when I drag myself out of bed on these rainy gray spring mornings in Seattle.