4:30

Perhaps what I like best about being up north are the wee hours of the morning. If there's an advantage to not feeling well, as I did not feel well yesterday, it's that medicines can ease you into sleep. I slept from about Noon until 3:30 Friday afternoon, got up long enough to have a bite to eat and re-medicate, and was asleep again from 5 late in the afternoon until 2 or so this morning. I'm still a bit headachy though.

Be that as it may, sometimes a walk can clear the mind. A small headache I have discovered might actually break with activity. So at 4:30 I took a walk, just as the dawn was rising.

What you cannot see in the city you can see quite well in the country. Through breaks in the lowest clouds I could spy the first faint rays of the Sun creeping up from the horizon, the heavens through the clouds more gray than blue. I can't recall seeing much of early dawn while in Detroit; you can tell the Sun is on its way by how the sky overhead brightens but you don't see much horizon. I wished it weren't so cloudy so that I might have seen early morning color. Tomorrow maybe.

I went far enough out State Route 134, the major thoroughfare near Hessel, that I felt I should turn back. A storm was a brewin' - I had checked the radar online before heading out, as old men will do - and I thought I had best not stray too far. This had me headed west. I could make out low rumblings of thunder and the faintest lightning not more than ten degrees above that horizon: quick flashes chased by tiny rolls of grumbling sound. I watched the western flashes of light grow closer, heard the thunder rise in timbre as I neared home.

As I sat on the porch with a hot coffee the rain just began. It isn't so hard yet but I expected to be chased inside sooner rather than later. It is just as well. The bread won't toast itself.