There’s nothing quite like the pure darkness of an early country morning. There’s a tangible quiet to those almost-witching hours when nothing’s moving and even the coyotes have gone silent.
It’s the best time and place in the world for deep sleep.
Unfortunately for my 11-year-old self, back on the ranch in Arizona, it was not the easiest place to wake up early.
At the time, I’d figured out that if I got up at 4:00 a.m. (the earliest time a preteen was allowed out of bed), I could finish my schoolwork by nine or ten. Which meant I could spend the rest of the morning writing my second novel on Mama’s old typewriter.
Yay for homeschooling!
The trouble was that in an effort to make sure I was getting up by four, I was waking up by three and even two in the morning. Plus, I didn’t have an alarm clock, so to pull that off, I just couldn’t allow myself to sleep all that hard.
In other words, I wasn’t sleeping enough… and it started to take a toll.
That was when my parents gave me one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever received.