My morning routine since September has been this: I rise at about 5 a.m. (because my body can’t help it, not because I’m noble) and drink water while I make coffee in the dark kitchen. I use a French press simply because I believe it produces better-tasting coffee, even though the steps are a wee bit messier and it takes a few minutes longer than a push-the-button style counterpart. This process, including heating the water in the kettle over the stove (the electric kettle broke a few years ago and I never bothered to replace it), takes about ten minutes. While I wait, I drink as much water as I can and stretch my body awake.
I then traipse over to my green velvet armchair in the living room, mug in one hand and stack of books in the other. It’s still dark, so I’ve illumined my path with a neck-wrap flashlight (my favorite stocking stuffer of last year). This time of year, the lights on the Christmas tree join my flashlight as a source of puncturing the dark—otherwise, though, I like to keep it as dark as possible on purpose. It aids in my concentration and revelry in being the sole conscious being awake in the house.
I read (paper only; my phone is as far away from me as possible), pray, and write for about two hours until Kyle joins me in his chair next to mine. (Note: I realize how this sounds if you’ve got small children: please know that for more than a decade, my morning routine was about 15 minutes on average. I get it. Really.) I’m almost done having read through the New Testament this fall, and since early November I’ve also been reading through Church history (as of this morning, I’m now on St. Thomas Beckett). I’ll also often read one more thing—a devotional sometimes, some other contemplative work of non-fiction, or occasionally some poetry—this month it’s been Winter Fire, the Christmas-themed collection of Chesterton thoughts turned into a cozy daily devotional. Whatever it is, I read it slowly. There’s no hurry, no competition. I need to savor words this time of day. I need them to do their work on me.
After I read and pray, I then plan the rest of my day, looking at the previous days’ to-do list and transferring over what didn’t get done, as well as looking what’s on the calendar for today and planning accordingly. At this point, I also have to force myself to change into public-facing clothes and take the dog on our morning walk, which is getting inevitably harder and harder to do these days as the temps drop (in Texas terms, anyway).
I’m always glad I go, though; it’s a simple delight to watch our town square wake up: shopkeepers prep their wares behind storefront windows, county employees walk to the courthouse in the square’s center, and other neighbors walk their dogs. We usually pass the same canines and their same owners. Everyone says hello as we pass because to live in this old neighborhood on purpose, with the accompanying challenges attached to living in an old small house, you do so in order to reclaim a sense of sanity in a rapidly modernizing world. Neighbors and shopkeepers are here because they want to say hello to each other.
Once I walk back in the front door, the house has become groggily awake: the boys are coming into consciousness and are either starting their morning chores, their independent schoolwork, or (in the case of the 13-year-old), are avoiding both by listening to an audiobook while tinkering with tools. He’s hoping that I’ll find this charming and endearing enough to let him skip out of both. I’ll admit there are days when I’m tempted.
Because we homeschool most days, the boys eventually come to the living room at the appointed time, when we then engage in a familiar routine: we start with Symposium, then move on to humanities. Some days this is literature, some days it’s history, sometimes it’s straight-up grammar and composition. This week, we’re wrapping up the Civil War, A Christmas Carol, writing original speculative short stories, and editing terribly-written-on-purpose paragraphs.
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