What Happens at this Hour

It's 4:30 in the morning and I am sitting in the back yard with a cup of coffee and a white legal pad of paper and a pen. The sky is cloudy and rumbling, orange-tinted with occasional flashes of blue from heat lightening. The canopies of trees appear black. The air itself is utterly still. It's a surprise to hear cars on the freeway at this hour. Birds are coming into their noise. These are the only sounds--mild thunder, birds, and the rush of cars. That, and the Patsy Cline songs stuck on repeat in my head. When I hear a noise interrupt these predetermined sounds of the dark--a rustling in the grass nearby--I ignore it because I don't know what it means. Isn't that the way of the dark--the sense that anything can happen, and our minds can betray us. It's terribly romantic in these hours. And somewhere the sun is rising, frogs jump from lillypads, people are running, crying, fighting, dying, dreaming, working, smiling, eating, loving, moving, being born. A rock is sliding down a mountain, flowers are blooming open, a boat is crossing the water. At every moment the landscape of the Saharas change. A friend of mine once wrote a flash fiction piece about a fisherman who called out a random word and it came to be that whenever someone in the world is at a loss for a word, that word will find a tongue somewhere else. That's what it means to have random thoughts--words borrowed from strangers. Now bats are circling and fat droplets of rain are soaking into the page. When my kids awake and see the sky I will tell them we get to walk inside the shadows of clouds today.