My first morning in a new place always starts with a early morning wake-up yes! and then I have already scouted out a promising looking coffee spot and I'm there around dawn with a local newspaper, perfunctory because all I really want to do is watch the new place wake up like a new girl: I want to see her yawn and then stretch: I want to see her hair when it is still tousled and I want the feel of it when she's still covered in the late August sleepwarmth. It's puts me at an advantage to be up first, I've thought thirteen thousand things before she's even stirred, this gray Appalachian village: I know your secret heart for I have seen you asleep and looked everything over and you don't know me at all. Later, i promise, you will know me later.
There is no town as lovely as a new town first thing in the morning before she even starts to speak.
The third morning I stay inside where the fans are blowing. The third morning I have made my own coffee and am reading my own books. The third morning I saw the boy maybe seven lonely waiting for a yellow schoolbus and he's bent down to the ground, he's examining something, a bug, I think, he's found himself some beetle or lady bug and now he has adopted it and named it and will take it to school: either that or he's going to torture it, this poor bug, pull out its legs poke it with a stick and basically slowly kill it to death-
-because that's what boys do, one or the other, they name it or torture it: it is always one or the other.
