I stepped out onto my front porch at 5:30 a.m. today.  I had been awake since 3:15 and it seemed silly to continue trying to re-submerge myself in twilight.

The newspaper had not yet come. I leaned down and emptied the cup of cat food into the bowl which lives out there, where our boycat comes for breakfast, slinking up the three stairs in the dark each morning.  As I stood, movement across the street caught my eye.  I squinted; could that be. . .?  Yes, it was.

The man whom I used to see walking to and from some point north of here trudged down the sidewalk across from my house.  In the dim light, I could discern the square black attache case, the familiar white jacket, the solidly centered hat tilted slightly forward on his brow.  He walked without hesitation or pause.  I watched for a minute, until he went beyond my sight line just as the headlights of the paper delivery truck swept across my front yard in the morning’s lingering darkness.

As I went back into the house, I thought about the many mornings when I’ve sat outside on the porch, writing, watching, as that same man journeyed north in the morning and back south in the late afternoon.  I first saw him in 2008, the summer when I started my original blog as weekly Musings to my lawyers’ listserve, during the six weeks when my son went to Mexico and I began to learn to live on my own.

I put the newspaper down in the breakfast room and walked over to the coffee pot.  Steam rose from the hot liquid and the fragrance of freshly brewed coffee wafted in the air.  A clean smell, a familiar smell.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I sat on my wooden stool and opened the newspaper, to the headlines about more violence in the county of my childhood.  Another day in paradise.

Sunset over the Pacific Ocean in Pescedaro, California; which has nothing to do with this entry but I like this picture so much, I just wanted to share it.