Day 37: the sunrise

I'm writing Ann Dee Ellis' 8 Minute Memoirs.

I've always liked watching the sunrise, but I'd rather stay up and wait for it than wake up in time to see it. I'm a classic night owl. I can train myself (and at times have) to wake up early, but I can spend months on my trained sleep schedule and then throw it off staying up until 2 am just one time.

It's hard for me to balance the fact that I am productive in the wee hours of the night against my need to be places and doing work in the mornings. Grad school now is teaching me to squeeze out productivity whenever I can and sleep as much as possible, but it's a hard balance to strike when I'm still trying to maintain friendships and my marriage.

But I digress.

Sunrises in Rexburg were some of my favorites. On hard nights, I would wait until my roommates were asleep and the parking lots were empty and sneak out sometime between one and three am. Sometimes I would walk to the park, other times I would wander campus. If I waited long enough to go walking, people would just assume I was on my way to an early morning janitorial job. (Side note: I did try that for a while. It was awful.) Once I had a car with me, I would drive just outside the city limits and fly up and down the hilly roads. I'd find a good hill, park facing the east, sit on the roof of my car, and write in my journal until the sun rose. As soon as orange started spreading across the sky, I'd set my journal down and watch. I took pictures a few times, but those usually fail to capture the majesty of the entire sky lighting up for the first time in the day.

When Casey and I were on our first date, we watched the sunrise together. Living west of large mountains meant we could only see the sky go quickly from dark to light, but as we sat in the car together, watching the mountain, listening to the White Album, and holding hands for the first time, I couldn't help but think how nice it was to have stayed awake long enough to let the light shine on us together.