The sounds of dawn are cars racing down Western.
The cars get more frequent but slower, the Doppler screams of early morning racers becoming moans as stray drivers morph into that thing called traffic.
The slow tear of an airplane comes overhead. A train groans by in the distance.
The sounds of dawn are movement, life. They’re of people getting to and from.
The sounds of dawn are the hiss of a kettle for some tea. It’s a cheat on my part, the only sound coming from within and the only sound not of motion. I’m not going anywhere.
It’s a neon world through the window. Neon and streetlamp and a gray-green haze of sky that can’t decide whether to give in to yesterday’s snow.
I hunker down to watch, to listen, to take a break from the history, politics and old man schvitzes of the last week to see what my keyboard can whip up when given no ingredients.
A plastic bag caught in still-bare tree branches whips and shred in the wind.
I step outside for context on touch. It’s cold. No surprise.
The tastes of dawn are now-oversteeped tea and a moist, crumbly cookie my mother sent for Purim. My quiet, gray-green dawn tastes of poppy seeds and butter.
More cars, more trains, more motion outside. The morning noises become anxious.
Somewhere the noises are coyotes and hens. Somewhere they’re honks and blares and tire squeals of even more urban settings.
Somewhere the sounds of dawn are keening babies, gurgling pipes, sleepy talks over breakfasts taken standing. Site-specific noises from that person’s life.
Those are their dawns.
This beautiful, slow, aching but ultimately common dawn of Doppler cars and poppy seeds and the tap-tap-tap of a keyboard trying to catch it all, that’s mine.
Read about another quiet March moment
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