The alarm clock sounds at 4:15AM, but I pretend like I don't hear it.  I pull the comforter over my head until the beeping is faint, like a heartbeat.    As if that was enough.  It's not.  Because we don't have one alarm clock, we have three, and two of them don't have a snooze.  I don't know what it is about dogs, but they go from sound asleep to 100-Watt awake in seconds.  When Sadie hears our alarm, she joins in- a bark that used to be cute when she was a puppy but is more and more sounding like just another loud dog.  And when Sadie barks, Micky barks- a hair-raising noise that brings all kinds of swear words to mind before I'm even fully awake.  By 4:16AM our little house is a cacaphony of noise.  I pretend not to hear a thing.  I remain still, even though my senses are jarred and (more than) slightly annoyed. 

 Eventually Rich gets up and herds the dogs onto the porch where Sadie slips through the gate and wanders around the yard and woods while Micky (who is much to large to slip through any gate, and has a strange fear of all things gate-related) barks his complaining and jealous monologue from the porch.  Rich starts the French Press and then walks the dogs while I pretend to "be up in a minute."  By 5AM I hear them coming back inside and I jump out of bed, before they get upstairs so that he'll think I've been up the whole time.  He knows better.   The next half hour is a flurry of showers and searching the drier for clean socks while packing the car with whatever we need for the day.  Most of our dry goods are kept here at the house.  There's just no room in the 89 square foot shop, so we load up on whatever doesn't need refridgeration.  We lure the dogs downstairs into the basement with pieces of cheese and exasperated calls.  At 5:30 one of us shouts, "This is the five minute warning!  The train is leaving in 5 minutes!"  But like most commuter rails, it's nearly quarter to 6 before we're on our way.  "Good morning!"  I say to him as we pull out of the driveway.  And it is.  It is a good morning and we are on our way.

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