Up early and what a racket!

Sunday morning. (Photo by Katy Buchanan)

One of the ways life changes with age is the diminishing capacity for sleep. (Note: I am not saying need for sleep, just capacity. Big difference.) That diminishing capacity means wakefulness during hours, that, in youth, I would have been thoughtlessly enjoying sleep. That diminishing capacity also means that, that same wakefulness blesses me with the gradual noise of early mornings.

The 3 a.m. quiet, with cat sitting at an open window. Me at my laptop, checking email and newspapers. Then an increasing racketing of bird song, so that by 5 a.m.-ish the world outside is a symphony of chirps and calls. (Cat has abandoned window by this point and is snoozing in his basket.)

It's prime bird time and I would not be alive to it were it not for the fact that I can't sleep. I think there is some irony involved here. Birds are wide awake, but that's because it's their job.

Anyway, I love the before-dawn chorus. It really is a racket, and I can hear layers of songs, some close, others a bit farther away.

As an aside, one night last week I watched swallows dipping and diving in the 5 p.m.-ish sky, near my Mom's house, chasing after bugs for their evening meal. They are pretty birds. Glad I noticed, but could not help but wonder what a small number of them were flitting about.

Pretty sky in Pittsburgh this morning, too.

Happy Birthday

This has to go into the books as an unremarkable birthday, except that I slept too late. There might be a bit of symmetry there if I could remember my mother ever telling me that I arrived in this world early, late or just about on time. Perhaps a remarkable aspect of me is that I can be all three. I am never perpetually late, early or just about on time.

I prefer to mix things up; it's the Aquarian in me.

Back to the birthday. It could not even be called remarkable in that it was defined by 2 and 3 feet high drifts of snow outside, because, after, all it is February in a northern climate even though such heavy falls are less common now then when I was younger.

What could be remarkable is that, except for shoveling snow, I take the dreary weather of my birth month with much more equanimity now that I am older, or as singer-songwriter-actor Loudon Wainwright III (63) told Terri Gross in an interview on "Fresh Air" this afternoon, "closer to the end."

I'm not a particular fan of LWJ, but I enjoyed the interview because Terri Gross asks good questions; for example wondering what it was like for him to revisit songs he had written as a young and very different man, singing with a much younger voice. I don't recall the answer; I just was struck by the empathy the question evoked in me, because I feel like such a completely different person from young Katy. The journey hasn't always been easy, but it has been interesting. I've learned a lot that has helped me to be, I hope, a better person.

There are 50 minutes left in my birthday. Snow is falling and time is passing, softening all hard edges.