5:30 a.m.

A lover once asked me as I slipped into clothes before the sun had come up, why I woke up so early. It's 5:30 in the morning, he said as he set the clock back down. The first light of day brightened the blue on the eastern horizon. I could see the outline of his hair sticking up from sleeping on it throughout the night. I smiled in the darkness of the morning and climbed back into bed and into his arms and told him. When I was a girl, I lived with my grandmother. She would get up and I would hear the clanking of plates getting washed in the sink, the coffee kettle being heated up, the opening and closing of the refrigerator door and cabinets. Spoons, knives, forks, blenders. You name it, I heard it. Not only did I hear all of the sounds of a functional kitchen in use, she would hum along with her lemon yellow canary she kept in a large white wicker cage on the Sony stereo in the living room. His beak was flecked with black and white too. She bought him at a flea market years before I could remember anything. There in my bed, I would wrap my head and my ears with an unbendable pillow, trying to deafen out the sounds of the tings and clanks of dishes, silverware, and the songs of an old woman and her bird stirring up a ruckus in the entire front part of the house. It's 5 in the morning, what is she, in the Army? I found myself genuinely annoyed. I would roll miserably in my bed until I finally grew tired of not sleeping and would get up.

This went on for what felt like forever, until one day, my grandmother's yellow canary died. The only sounds I heard now where those that came from my grandmother. I would lay in my bed listening to her make breakfast. Cutting tomatoes for the scrambled eggs and apples for the maple oatmeal. I knew she was doing what she always did, but now she was alone in the morning. I felt bad for her, because the singing stopped. And I knew she missed the songs of her feathered friend. I didn't mind hearing her in the kitchen anymore, while the morning was still dark outside. In fact, I started waking up on my own happily listening for my grandmother in the kitchen. I found a comfort I would never know again in my life, that feeling of warmth when you are home and little and people love you and take care of you and you don't really even notice it cause that is the only thing you've known your entire 8 years of existence.

Time went on, and then my grandmother passed away. I would still wake up on my own in the dark of the morning. Only instead of dishes and the sounds of birds, it was to silence. A silence that remembered that just yesterday there was a woman and her bird waking up alive every morning, and they were happy about it. A silence that reminded me she was gone. There in the light creeping over the Sierra Nevada, tears would welt up in my eyes for Leonor and her canary. Every morning I cried, I cannot express how much I missed hearing my grandmother and her little bird in the kitchen. I missed them so much, I started to wake up myself at 05:30 a.m.

I miss my grandmother terribly. She died many years ago, but her absence is still felt, to this day when I open my eyes before the sun has risen. I think of her and now it is me that is banging the dishes around in the kitchen while it is still dark blue outside. I don't have a bird, because I travel and have moved into houses, bungalows, and apartments I have lost count of. But my friends that have stayed with me know how early I get up. They hear me pecking at the keys of a keyboard, spoons hitting the lips of a mug as I stir coffee, or the faint sounds of Nat King Cole or the Buena Vista Social Club and me singing along to them. Years after any of us leaving, they are the ones that now tell me how much they miss hearing me stirring up a ruckus at that godawful hour of 05:30 a.m.