Photos by Linda Joy Burke
These days I wake just after dawn, my happy dog eager to get on with the new day, in pre bark mode, she paws my arm, licks my nose, growls her request that I finish with my rest. She takes no heed to my protesting that I was never a morning person. She doesn't care that I'm used to staying up til the wee hours with the best of the world weary. She doesn't care if I think I'm more profound writing alone in the middle of the night.
I have learned to love the clean slate of dawn as much as the deep stillness in the middle of the night. I love the smell of a new day's air, before the transports start to role and people with their mindless urgencies spill out into the world, love hearing the delighted songs of birds calling their mates, love the sights of a wild fox slipping in and out of the cover of the underbrush, or a hawk hunting prey, love how my dog finds pleasure in every scent that she encounters even the stuff I find gross, love how she requires play, her bursts of exuberant energy so fundamentally joyful that whatever weakness I feel towards rising so early is transformed.
Transformation isn't always what it's cracked up to be though, you never know when you'll walk past the neighborhood middle school to see the latest graffiti -
I've never seen such admiration for a common garden tool coming from a contemporary suburban kid, makes you wonder what they're learning in that school.
This is a photo taken in a drug free school zone. Actually this photo is from the grounds of the middle school, and the vodka and Jim Beam bottles have been in this same spot for months. I really do wonder what kids are learning these days about doing the right thing, instead of taking the easy way to the end result, just getting by on the least effort, or complaining that folks don't care anymore.
The impact of the trashing of their environment has to have some profound long term affect on how they perceive the earth's value. In the blocks around this drug free school zone there are broken Heineken bottles littering the sidewalks and bike paths on the way to the schools, empty forties strewn in the woods, hard liquor bottles left in the fenced in area around the school's heating system.
Tiny plastic bags dot the football field and cases of Budweiser and Coors cans pile up in the surrounding woods. One day while I was walking my dog, I saw a guy picking up cans. I went up to him to thank him for picking up litter in the neighborhood. He told me he wasn't picking up litter, just the cans, he could sell the aluminum for money. I told him that I often picked up trash and recycled the cans and bottles.
I guess I was proud of my service to the community and was bragging a bit. He wasn't impressed though, instead he told me to leave the cans on the ground, so that he could collect them. I don't. Then he told me how bad the neighborhood was, showed me a bowie knife that he had securely fastened to his belt, told me to read PS (a local free adzine) then I'd see how bad it was here where I lived, alluded to the fact that he'd been threatened, said I should watch my back.
All Rights Reserved by Author
