here,there & elsewhere. Waking up

Let’s be clear: I am an urban person. Mornings are not my favourite time of the day. I prefer to have my own room and bathroom. I am used to deciding how to organise my day’s schedule based on my needs rather than someone else’s. I like using electronic gadgets such as computers and cell phones. But here on the farm, it’s like we’ve travelled to another planet and I’ve become a different person altogether.

It begins with waking up early. The eastern horizon has barely shown a glimmer of light, but my eyes open of their own accord. The air is crisp and still. The room is in darkness and the fluorescent stars that had been stuck onto the ceiling are now invisible. But a tickle of scent wafts up from the kitchen downstairs via the small square grate pierced through the sturdy wooden planks of the floor. It’s the only way that heat from the wood-fire stove can penetrate upstairs. Along with heat comes the scent of coffee: Grace is grinding beans for her first cup of the day using an old-fashioned rotary hand-operated mill.

Bins is an early riser. He’s already gone down. It’s still dark in the room, but I gather together a second layer of clothes and put them on in the gloom because the quality of light is so magical I don’t want to turn on the light. There’s nothing but the grey-blue dawn showing through the small glass panes of the window. All the surfaces I can see around me are made of wood, paper and cotton, iron, glass and ceramic: no plastic anywhere in sight, no nylon, no polystyrene. To disturb this tranquil darkness with an incandescent light feels sacrilegious.

I creep downstairs. The stairs turn sharply, twice, with no hand-rail: it’s a perilous journey. Downstairs, Birk is still on his couch, dead to the world, like a felled giant. Bins and Grace are leaning on the tiny kitchen counter talking softly; on the black iron hob of the wood-stove a copper kettle approaches the boil. Both dogs get to their feet, their tails wagging slowly. “Sleep okay?” asks Grace. “Like a log,” I respond and Bins adds, “... and snoring like a diesel engine!” I bop him on the shoulder and look around, wanting to explore.

“You can let the dogs out,” suggests Grace. “They always need to pee.” I open the door and they practically push me over as they burst out. The air feels as if it’s full of tiny invisible crystals. I grab my windcheater from where I left it hanging up last night, just by the door and step out: brrrr! My breath emerges in soft white clouds. I look left and right, my eyes stinging because of the sharp dry air. I take in the tilting plane of the land, the barn in front of me, the trees rimming the horizon in all directions, the pearl-grey sky.

A skein of geese flies overhead right then, heading south. “Oh! You must be cold!” I say to them, waving. “Yes, yes, yes ...” they honk, hurrying away.

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

Last episode: Goat night

COMMENT NOW