Categories
mental health Writing

Flowers of Light

Ten thousand feet on a Friday, and I am happy again. The shadowy November mood flood has finally receded. Along with it, at last, has gone the lingering mistrust of my mind.  

Flowers of light scatter over the snow. Aquamarine and burnt orange glint fire into the winter air.  Weston Pass Road splits this broad field of prism-flowers. My sky-blue skis float over the gathered cold-water specks, cutting paired boat wakes that cast minute waves. In the quiet morning, snow hums a high-pitched “swish.”  My heart drums faster with each push up the hill. Still hesitant to let myself fully reach, to stretch my capacity, I slow a bit and remind myself that undercurrents of grief-fueled sadness won’t take me over today. The season has turned.

I whoosh over last night’s wind-smoothed dusting, then leave the unplowed road to flounder between sets of aspen and over brown tips of sunken grass.  The small slab under me compresses, then sinks with a groan. Are there mice below, whose tunnels have been buried?  Are there fish? 

The more I write, the more grateful I am for the elemental freedom to convey experience, to net up words then plop them down, to embrace imperfection in a moment just like this.

Categories
mental health

Thanksgiving

To not be depressed, again, pretend you are okay. Buy new makeup. Feel the touch of the lovely young woman who steps out from behind the counter and uses a soft brush to smooth foundation over your face. Listen as she tells you with kindness how important it is to blend with care.  After she puts blush on your cheeks, look in the mirror and feel better.  Accept the samples she gives you.  At home, use a cotton ball to remove the layers of pale brown, of cheerful pink, until you look like you did before, just a little less tired.

Avoid going to therapy. Believe you can afford perfume that makes you want to love yourself again, but therapy is too expensive.

Keep exercising, no matter what. You know how to cope. You know you won’t give in. Crave the shelter of your queen size duvet like you once craved summer. Resist the craving. Remind yourself that the living room catches enough November light that even if your eyes are closed, one speck of encroaching darkness might have been frightened off.

When your back starts to hurt, know whose fault it is. Hear the voice blaming you for exercising when you needed rest. Question its logic. The next day, notice that you think you are in pain because you didn’t do enough.  Crawl under the duvet at noon and prop pillows under your knees. Sleep until you feel like getting up. Be cheerful as you eat the dinner your sweet husband made for you. Go to bed early.  Wake up late.

Decide that you can eat all the sugar you want, then do it.  When you wish you could cry, eat ice cream because for a few minutes, you feel like a normal person.

Let your sleep patterns become Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Walk around thinking FUBAR, FUBAR. I am FUBAR.

Cancel plans. Stay home. Ignore texts and emails. Anyone who loves you, really loves you, knows that this happens to you sometimes. Wish it weren’t happening as you avoid people who you now think have no reason to love you.

Wake up early today, feeling something. Stand outside shivering under it all as the blue-greens and purples deepen, as they shift to orange and pale pink. Touch your wet face and feel grateful for a kind of letting go. Remember that crying for yourself and all of your invisible losses–that weeping for the world and all the wasted lives—can be a prayer, too, can be, in fact, a form of thanksgiving.

Categories
humor

Magic Chef

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Fifteen years ago, when we first showed our newly acquired antique cook stove to a friend in the construction business who is also a gourmet cook, his jaw dropped. “Whoah,” he said.  “I can’t say anything about this appliance until my erection subsides. Where did you find this thing?”

A 1930’s Magic Chef gas range with four burners, storage drawers, and a small oven, it is covered in pristine white enamel. Instead of horizontal handles to open the oven and the burner below it, we tug hanging vertical grips. The stove is a work of art, even if it weighs a gajillion pounds and was hell to lug up the two back stairs and into the cabin kitchen.

When the cook stove arrived, our “kitchen” here consisted of a white sink and very occasional running water. Wine crate shelves once nailed to the walls were still stacked in a corner when our gently used cabinets arrived. The same friend who first admired the stove had rescued them for us from a remodel project. Above the Magic Chef, the husband and two of our then teenaged sons installed a shelf and spice cupboard.  They list heavily to starboard. I straighten them now and then by tilting my head just a tad.

Through years of zero extra time or money, the stove sat cold, uninstalled. We percolated coffee or boiled spaghetti on a tiny camp stove perched on its top. Redemption came one day in the form of a Fairplay plumber who confidently ran propane to the originally natural gas burners. A trick he taught me:  to turn on the sluggish front ring after the pilot is lit, just give it plenty of propane and blow a good, strong, birthday-candle breath over the top to help with ignition. Only bits of stray bangs and the very top of an eyebrow have been sacrificed over the years using this technique.

One Thanksgiving, we filled the cabin with young folks and set about heating side dishes and warming pies, coaxing extra heat from the fickle oven. More than once, with a small “boom,” flames erupted ever so briefly from the Magic Chef’s torso. These weren’t explosions, exactly, but they were big enough to leave black smudges on the cabinet next to the stove. Now that the husband is the only one brave enough to run the oven, he likes to warm up the house on winter visits by baking enchiladas or banana bread in the ninety-year-old, leaky heat cave.  This November, we will once again, with courage, heat savory and sweets, proteins and greens, in the Magic Chef. We will throw a tablecloth over pine planks long ago nailed to a set of alley-found white table legs.  Before the husband and I reach our own tenth decades, surely, we will have a more predictable, less magical stove here.

Turns out we can both wait at least one more season.

Categories
mental health

Skateable Hills

Photo by Zachary DeBottis on Pexels.com

I bet I recognize some of those skateboarders, says my thirty-year-old son, whose Instagram followers see him fly over the hood of a pickup truck, land on his shoulder, then do it again and land all four wheels. We sit with his dad, at Illegal Pete’s on Colfax, warm smothered burritos and Baja tacos in front of us. My oldest child is well today, clear-eyed, and hungry for life.

Above the bar, a TV broadcasts skateboard after skateboard zooming down the hilly streets of San Francisco. They move at impossible speeds and accomplish death-defying tricks–leaping trash cans in narrow alleys, defying gravity on vertical “wall rides” before continuing down a handrail to a smooth landing. One young man scutters his board down a steep, block-long set of three-inch concrete steps. His white shoes vibrate, and his ankles shake all the way down.

I turn away from the flashing colors and lights of the video, worrying, as I often do, about injuries, about the devastation a blow to the head can wreak. I can’t watch scary movies, and that damn video of my son, helmetless, jumping the pickup truck, turns my ribs to ice.

When he was fourteen–already an avid skateboarder–none of us understood the bipolarity fueling his adolescent “behavior problems,” his inability to get up in the morning, his impulsive bursts of spring rebellion. Diagnosed at eighteen, much of the following decade of his life was consumed by paralyzing depressions quickly followed by brief, destructive manias. Only seven years ago, his atypical brain produced one of those spiking electrical storms that can kill. That almost did kill.

All the twists and turns, the jumps and falls in his pursuit of a livable life, a life out of reach for too many people. Today, we pay for our lunch from a full checking account; we wear the skin of privilege, easily forgetting how many ways the world is built to keep people like us comfortable. And here is this young man, so capable, so confident. Able today, able this year, able to do and be so much. 

Jesus, these guys are flying! he says now, as I, too am pulled back into the video.

His dad asks, How are they not getting hit by cars? A moment later, a skater does gets hit by a car, and the three of us flinch in unison. The camera zooms to the injured young man’s face. He sits on a curb, holding a bleeding hand, his face blank with pain.

I look away from the next cascade of young men twisting, jumping, flying.

My charismatic, athletic son passes for a person without disability. He teaches skateboarding to kids in schools, and he teaches behavior skills to young people on the autism spectrum. Nine months into his longest stretch of stable mood since he became a teenager, he can work three six-hour shifts per week, plus teach a few skate lessons. He needs hours of down time every day to play video games or read or nap. He walks over from the carriage house apartment where he lives to our big family kitchen that I compulsively stock with greens and walnuts, with organic kombucha and ripening avocados. He goes to meetings. He goes to therapy. He takes three psych meds–seven pills a day–to keep his mood on reasonably level ground. To keep him alive.

As we gather our lunch refuse, one more run pulls our attention back to the TV. At the bottom of a hill, after an especially fast and skilled descent, a group of skateboarders hug and fist bump, eyes shining.

It’s the love. My son says this about the sport that helped save his life. It’s all about the love.

Categories
humor Memoir Writing

That Damn Mustard

Whenever I write about my dad, who died almost ten years ago, at 91, I feel happy. He had a big heart and a brilliant wit. Of course, as my sister likes to say, our folks didn’t read all those fancy parenting books, but even writing about hard times, I appreciate finding my father on the page. He always reminds me to take pleasure in words, in food, and in family.

I want to tell you about the mustard. I wandered outside on a break from the book and looked around for a stone to add to the marker where his ashes are.  How my father’s ashes ended up buried here by the Fairplay cabin, and not in Iceland as he had wished, is not the mustard story. Why I place stones when I go see that spot is also a different story. I will, however, tell you this, loosely related to mustard, which was his favorite condiment. My father loved going to church, and this place felt like church to us. Both of us used to cry when we sang hymns, maybe out of relief. (God does love a sinner, I’ve heard, because we tend to be more interesting people.) Dad also loved old drinking songs: “How Dry I Am” and “In Heaven there is No Beer” were two favorites that he might sing to wind up a night at the campfire.

This morning, hunting around for the right stone, I came across a plastic bottle of mustard next to the fire pit. It’s Safeway brand: spicy beer whole grain mustard. Dad loved our neighborhood Safeway, and whenever I go there, I put in the old phone number he gave them twenty years ago so we could get our discount.  It always makes me smile. The Safeway mustard is peppery, like my dad could be. And it’s got lager in it. He preferred Stroh’s, but now and then, he could really enjoy a fancy beer.

Before the cabin got walls and a roof, my parents would visit from Florida and sit outside with my husband and our boys. Dad demonstrated the fine art of making his wife laugh, and soon, my husband took up the habit. This has been one of my dad’s most lasting gifts.

Today I picked up this mustard that one of our sons left out a couple of nights ago. Dad would be glad I didn’t even think of throwing it away. I carried it with me to the little bench by his ashes and his stones and said Hi Dad! Like I always do. And I said I miss you, which I don’t always do.

Then out of nowhere—and I mean nowhere, because I’m grateful for his long life and his peaceful death and wherever he is now; this is a man who drank (almost) all the beer he wanted and danced (almost) all the dances he could. He had a good, good life, and a long one. Still, out of nowhere, I said, I wish you were here, I wish you would come back!  And I burst out crying. I don’t usually cry hard anymore. I really have no reason. This morning, though, when I stood there with that mustard in my hand, I was just a little girl wanting to put her head on her daddy’s shoulder one more time. I sat on the bench for a while, and I’m telling you, the meadow was beautiful like I’ve never seen it, the kind of green in the new aspen leaves and in the sprouts of grass that can only happen after a month of rain.

I know there’s nothing special about my grief, how I walk around in middle age without parents and with four sisters instead of five. I know that when I was in my forties, the friends who scooted ahead of me into the beyond, the counseling clients who tried and tried but just couldn’t make it–I know all those funerals and tears were warmup for the privilege of getting older and missing more people. I know Junes can just be like this. And I’m perfectly all right.

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Uncategorized

Merrimac, Michigan

Across the bay, afternoon sun illuminates the north end of Plum Island, where we walked this morning and where fresh water meets salt. In this harbor town of Newburyport, my friend and I sit on a third-floor deck overlooking the intersection of the Merrimack River and the Atlantic. A lull in conversation announces that after half a year, she and I have just about caught up. We open long-neck steamers one by one and eavesdrop on other tables.

As rain pours down day after day in Denver, I rest my eyes on the kind of green that just doesn’t grow there, regardless of how much rain we get. Here is the emerald green of coastline marsh, a weighty green edged by black mud. This serrated shore abuts year-round water that goes on and on and on.

The next day, I’m at 30,000 feet looking down at a Great Lake, but which one? All I know is that it isn’t my great lake, not Michigan. The south shore of this other fresh-water ocean is almost touching farmland, near wide-open countryside. A little later, big water gleams below again, and I look for the Indiana Dunes lakeshore, bracketed by the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant and the vertical stacks of steel mills. This next great lake is also not my lake, not where my body learned to be a body in water, a body at rest. Just inside this other lake’s curved edges hangs a long border of brightness–not beach, not yet, but submerged sand waiting for small summer waves to lift it ashore.

If we do fly over the lake of my life, clouds block it from view. Finally, I see Colorado’s eastern plains. Vapor mountain-shapes on the horizon slowly give way to the line of jagged, white-tipped peaks telling me I am almost home.

Categories
Memoir mental health

Dunedin Part 3

Photo by Alex Conchillos on Pexels.com

The Light and The Dark

On the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth day of my mother’s hospitalization, in the fall of 1980, I sit in the chancel of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, wearing a youth choir robe. Palm trees sway outside the sanctuary windows. I feel like a soft-limbed robot, and whatever I sing with the other altos, I sing with fear in my throat. I don’t know the word “sepsis” or that my father and oldest sister in Washington have been told to prepare themselves for Mamma’s death. I do know about fear. I know about having been bad, and about wanting another chance to be good.

On that morning, as I try to pray, my thoughts are shards of porcelain, sharp behind my eyes. Then, all at once, a bright warm light comes into my mind and lifts me out of broken thoughts. The light surrounds me, telling me without words that I will be all right, that I don’t have to be afraid. Warmth moves from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. This lifting up and calming down happens in an instant.

It could be that this exact light extends from my mind and heart and body to the mind and heart and body of my mother. Maybe you believe in something like this light, or in coincidence, or in a traumatized girl having a delusion. At different times in my life, I consider all of these. What matters is this: on that Sunday morning, my mother wakes up asking for food, for someone to please wash her hair. Instead of dying that day, she begins her recovery. And as soon as she is strong enough, my father brings her home to us in Dunedin.

Maybe because she is so skinny and pale, her eye sockets huge, that my mother seems to glow with life, to look at Florida and each of us with wonder. A snapshot of her in a wicker chair on my Aunt Barbara’s porch shows her with bony arms akimbo and legs crossed under a draping skirt. Her face is turned sideways, her cheekbones shadowed.

As her step steadies and her eyes soften, the mechanical in me recedes. I settle into her presence and into her touch. She smooths the hair from my face when I worry at night. I feel her hand and I feel her warm arm like a shawl around my shoulders.

One night, in the moist air of early winter, my parents dress for a party, he in a white shirt and dinner jacket, she in a rayon dress and low-heeled sandals. As they get into the car, my father hands my mother a cocktail. She looks down into the plastic cup filled with vodka and 7up and raises it—unsmiling–to her lips.

Panic lifts me from wherever I am standing to a view of the drink from just outside and above the car. What must that moment have been for my mother?  I imagine her having held those months of sobriety like an anchor rope growing heavier every day, until she had no choice but to let it go. 

Once again, she sits alone in front of the television for hour after hour. And once again, I start sitting with her, determined to help. On random nights, she drink-talks to me about her father not letting her go to college, because education is wasted on girls. Her voice slurs telling me how terrible it is to depend on a man: Never be stuck like I am! And tears streak her mascara into half-circles under her eyes.

Trying to save her from the shadows becomes my own night-time compulsion. I listen to her, and I shush her. I help her to bed and pull a sheet up to her chin as she tells me how sweet I am, how much she loves me. Rescuing her is my penitent duty, a chance to make up for every cigarette I ever stole from her, every lie I ever told, and every time I hated her. Like the hangovers and blackouts she must have suffered, I feel the after-effects of self-martyrdom like a slow, blistering burn. I am exhausted and increasingly confused. How, when she gets up the next day, can she not thank me for taking care of her?  I redouble my efforts to help and be good, to distract myself from the accumulating darkness of my resentment.

Categories
Memoir mental health

Dunedin, Part Two

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Must Remind Myself

Wild parakeets land between the heavy oval leaves of Nanny’s grapefruit tree, the tree whose strong branches hold late winter fruit full of bitter juice and sharp, white seeds. “Oh, the parakeets were pretty,” she tells me in her husky voice, “Florida is such a special place!” The flock of birds with gleaming green heads and pale under bellies, chattering away in pairs as they rested and preened, produced a combined mini-roar like nothing Nanny has heard before. I never see the parakeets, only feel the joy of their flight as she describes it to me.

The most alive place in Nanny’s house is her Florida room, with three walls of Jaoulosie windows in rectangular aluminum frames. Against the west-facing wall is a wooden table where Nanny sets down her orange juice, her pastry plate, or her cup of coffee, clearing space amid a shifting clutter of drawing pencils and paint tubes.  Alone, she often spends the day painting, delighting in the bright plumage of migrating cardinals or blue jays as she re-creates in oil and canvass a perfect Indiana Dunes sunset or a bouquet of pink carnations.

 A long, padded bench is heaped with pillows that I would curl around when I was four, when Mamma and I extended a winter visit that seemed to stretch forever into a long horizon of calm. Nanny’s house overflows with a gentle messiness. Each surface has a small stack of books, a “Cornerstone” magazine or “Reader’s Digest”. Her Bible sits on a table by her easy chair, across from the TV where she watches Jim Neighbors sing on the Laurence Welk show. She has an old-fashioned record player and opera albums.  To her, stereo speakers are a modern marvel.

Nanny is 85 and a widow ten years when my sister and I arrive at her house to start high school, in 1980. Twin beds in the guest room are covered in green polyester spreads. When we open the closet to hang up our ironed jeans, our shirts and church clothes, we are greeted by the smell of mothballs. Nanny’s kitchen is narrow and shadowed, its counters littered with rye breadcrumbs, the fridge stuffed with small plates of leftovers, with jars of rhubarb jelly and mold-frosted applesauce. There are none of my mother’s scrubbed surfaces, her bustling cleanliness, no windowsills filled with carefully tended cuttings. My sister and I bring our arguments, sometimes whispered, sometimes not. We slam doors without thinking, and we take long, hot showers that fill Nanny’s small bathroom with smoky steam on ninety-degree days.  We burst the seams of her small house with the expanding uncertainty of our lives.

In 1980 I am in Dunedin, but not happy, there but not there. Listening to Nanny’s story about the parakeets, yearn for her serene appreciation of Florida, and I want to believe in my own innocence again. The two or three weeks we expect to wait for our parents to come to Florida and move with us into our new house stretch to a month, to six weeks, to eight. We move over to Aunt Barbara’s house on San Mateo, where we use a different set of beds, push our clothes into another closet. The backyard here is overgrown with lush fronds tended by Uncle Jerry, whose feet are calloused from walking barefoot whenever possible. My uncle is working on a translation of poems from Spanish into English. His typewriter sits facing the screened in front porch and the small, rust colored car he calls the “Wankle,” where he leaves his car keys so he can always find them when he needs them.

Years later, I learn that our mother developed sepsis that fall, that our sister and father were told to prepare themselves for her death. At fourteen, I only know that our mother’s voice has become a faint whisper. For many days, she has not been able to talk on the phone with us at all. Day after day her strength recedes as a tide might that can never fill its former pools.

At Nanny’s house, at Aunt Barbara’s house, I keep a green notebook. I don’t write about my mother or the precariousness of our family. Summer entries are about kissing boys and smoking pot, about trying to not be mean to my nephews. The addresses of two friends from Junior High are scribbled in childish block letters, oozing with sincere plans to write, to stay in touch, to be a better person, at last. One September entry, I start to write “Aug,” but disappear it with three very hard, dark lines. Amid a jumble of fragments is this: “Everything will work out. Must remind myself.” My pen presses hard into the paper. I am trying to make the writing look good, look legible and even.

Then, crossed out in black ink, and later lined over in red, is the address where I could send letters to the hospital:  Mamma (temp) 201 23rd St., Wash DC 20027.

After that, I mostly write prayers, no dated entries for a long time.

Categories
Memoir

Dunedin, Part One

Photo by Alexey Demidov on Pexels.com

San Jose Circle

Just south of Palm Harbor, on Alternate 19, a two-lane highway running along Florida’s central Gulf Coast, a sign features a cheerful Scotsman wearing a kilt and holding a bagpipe.  “Welcome to Dunedin: Delightfully Different,” it reads. As a small child, in the early 70’s, this town where my grandmother and great-aunts lived filled me with wonder. When I was fourteen—uprooted and deeply afraid—I arrived there with my older sister to start high school while my mother languished in a hospital up north. My sense of wonder had been displaced by the slow creep of understanding: I might never see her again.

The youngest in a combined family of seven, I was both spoiled and anxious. I could often forget the unpredictable violence that punctuated my early life.  In a world where children are at the mercy of their parents, and where mercy exists, Dunedin’s San Jose Circle– a traffic ring fringed with swaying palms and fuzzy-needled evergreens–became my compass.

On childhood visits to Dunedin, I rode in the way-back of a loaded station wagon as my father drove south from our home just outside Washington, DC, away from winter and to this small Florida town known for oranges and pelicans and old people. Daddy turned left from Alternate 19 onto a wide street paved with red brick. As car tires thrummed over the rough surface, our mother gazed out the window, then looked back at us and smiled. Spanish Moss dripped from the boughs of trees like living tinsel, and a warm breeze carried the scent of orange concentrate from a citrus grove and nearby processing plant.

Daddy navigated slowly around the arc of San Jose Circle. A solitary wooden bench faced west, where the afternoon sun angled over the water of St. Joseph Sound. East of the circle was an elementary school, and directly south, a small pond where raucous ducks clamored for pieces of stale bread. Daddy turned left, pointing us north, then parked in the driveway of my Nanny’s house. When she came out to greet us, she opened her arms wide, her face aglow. She smelled of fresh-baked bread she had waiting to slice for us.

After dinner, we would walk to the end of San Jose Street for sunset. Across St. Joseph’s sound, shadows lengthened the tips of mangroves edging Caladesi Island, the protective strip of land between Dunedin and the open Gulf. I waded in chill December shallows next to old wooden pilings and sank my toes in low-tide muck. When the salt breeze turned cold, I snuggled in between my parents and basked in the gentle raspiness of Nanny’s voice as she pointed out a pelican flying close to the water or marveled at the close of another beautiful day.

On sunny winter mornings, my great Aunt Ruth watched me place pennies on the railroad track behind her house on Douglas Avenue, just a block from Nanny. I’d wait with my hands pressed over my ears for the train to rumble past, feeling the ground shake under my feet. Sometimes a muscled arm waved from the conductor’s window, and a friendly smile shone out for this blonde little girl and the elderly woman standing with her. After the caboose went by, Aunt Ruth, lean and straight where Nanny was round and soft, helped me search for the flattened copper ovals I would later show my big sisters.

Aunt Ruth lived with her own big sister, Dora, called DoDo, an oddly childish nick name for someone who seemed to me old beyond time. On late morning visits, as we filled their small house, I sat on a wooden stool that exuded a faint and friendly scent of dust. I drank sweet, fresh orange juice that Aunt Ruth poured for me into a jam jar. After the grown-ups finished their coffee and talking, Aunt Dora would play a hymn on the slightly out of tune upright piano that she had only recently learned to play. She answered our applause with a girlish smile to each of us in turn.

Over the following decade, two of my father’s sisters also moved to Dunedin, adding points of contact to San Jose Circle. The winter I was fourteen, my father decided to sell our house in Washington and move our family south, too. My mother’s lover–her best friend, Michael—was dead. The basement bedroom he rented from our family sat empty and cold. Before my father typed his resignation letter at the kitchen table, he had seen my report cards riddled with failures; he had smelled the pot smoke lingering on my jacket when I came home from junior high school.  

When he took early retirement, Daddy could not foresee that my mother’s long-delayed ulcer operation would lead to infection after infection, to two additional surgeries. He would drive from his temporary job in Virginia to briefly visit my mother in the hospital, as all of us prayed for her unlikely recovery.

Categories
humor mental health

Him, Me, Him, Me

Its 5:40, I can get coffee!

No, it’s 4:40, your phone is messed up. We have to go back to sleep. Let’s curl up. Ooof, if I’m on my left side, my knee hurts, if I’m on my right, my shoulder hurts and my vertigo turns on.

You are a wreck.

I am a wreck. I need to call Frank Azar. Remember? Been in a wreck? Call Frank Azar!

[snoring]

[aching]

5:40. Actual 5:40

I think I went back to sleep.

Yes, you did. I had an imaginary conversation in my head with a holocaust denier. That took a long time, so you definitely slept.

Coffee!

All night, the full moon poured itself in the windows. All night until the sun came up. My friend has told me it is an agitated full moon, with mars snuggled close. I say, not sleeping, if it weren’t so cold, I could sit outside and knit in the moonlight. I say, to me, standing by the propane stove at midnight, clouds scuttling north at high speed, covering the moon to reveal a pocket of dark sky dotted with stars: Dear God, how is so much beauty possible?

Did you see the moonset from our bedroom window?

No, I’m watching the sun come up.