The Break of Dawn in May

On the mornings I drive my 12-year-old son to the farm where he hunts turkeys, we are mostly quiet. It is a little after four in the morning, and I let him sip from my coffee, and together we peer through the mist that hangs low over the gravel road. Such a gift to be out at this time of day, or night, or whatever it is, alone with my boy and my thoughts and the sense of emergence.

On the drive home it is nearly light, and I think about my son when he was younger, a toddler, and how I never could have anticipated this. And what a gift that is, too, to realize how changeable and surprising life can be, how even a young human can determine his or her fate, choose things you’d never have chosen for them, and how those choices can lead you straight into this very moment, alone now in the early mist, driving slow, the window opened just an inch or two because nothing smells so good as the break of dawn in May.