early risers

My mother never slept in. Or, maybe I just woke up incredibly and unreasonably late. That probably describes me when I was in high school, when I’d wake on summer mornings just in time for my dad to arrive home for his lunch break. But it doesn’t explain away my childhood memories. Every morning, my mom greeted me already coffee’d and dressed. It didn’t matter if it was a Monday morning in January or a Saturday morning in June, she was up, she was smiling. My mom may have been a bit nutty in her quest to outshine the sun but I rarely woke to silence or emptiness. Except once. I still bear the mark of that morning in the form of a nose that looks like it was sculpted by a precocious moose. It was a Sunday. I know this because I got out of going to church that day. My...