There’s a song, called To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg, which I became acquainted with during my 16th summer while working and living at a Wisconsin Youth Conservation Camp.
Each morning, as we campers snoozed in cozy bunks in rustic lumberjack-era cabins shrouded in pre-dawn mist, we would perceive, from the corners of dreams or out-cold REM, the ever so slight inklings of piano music emanating from the camp loudspeaker.
The song, played on vinyl in the camp office, tiptoed at first into our heavy-lidded slow-to-come-to-life consciousness, and the singer, Dan Fogelberg, began:
“Watching the sun
Watching it come
Watching it come up over the rooftops”
Then, in slow but sure crescendo, it spread out across the camp, eliciting the first no-going-back-to-sleep-now stirrings among the slumbering workers.
“And maybe there are seasons
And maybe they change
And maybe to love is not so strange”
Every morning, in rumbling thunder or windy restlessness, that song woke us to the day that lay before us.
Not a morning person at that time in my life (show me a teenager who is), I loved waking to that song. It modeled for me how to rise and meet the day in the possibility of romance with life itself.
I used to occasionally play this song to rouse my boys before school, and have returned to listening to it in the last year.
It reminds me of that summer—of that soft dawn light carried on a breeze of fresh pine through screened cabin windows—of when the song did justice to a time of day I had previously loathed. That summer, I learned what morning is—the very best time of day.
Back then, it was physical hard work that would dim this fleeting moment of ante meridiem joy:
The bright harsh afternoon sun which reduced the landscape to a flat, one-dimensional plane;
The sore neck from looking up to trim branches on Department of Natural Resources Land;
The aroma of bleach and pit toilets that sticks in the nostrils after a week of State Park Campground duty;
And the sentimental-tinged realities swirling in my adolescent head as each day wore on: missing my best friend back home, and yet dreading the ever-approaching end of summer when I must leave this brief, but thoroughly established and adapted-to camp/work existence, never to return to it again.
But when I play To the Morning now, after these many years, this time, of course, on Spotify (which certainly can never quite measure up to a rusty loud speaker as conduit for a tune spinning on a record player in a northern conservation camp office), it all comes back and I remember--that when I meet the day in this way, and watch the eggy orb show it’s cherub face, be it above a stark frozen landscape in January or one teeming with the early June croaks and bleeps of frogs and trillings of Red Wing Blackbirds in the marsh outside my door, that morning is when we establish how it will go—this day.
And so I toast the morning in determined commitment, in a non-negotiable and oddly confident way, that, in the words of the song, “Yes! it is going to be a day where there really is nothing left to say but ‘come on morning.’”
Copyright Barb Harwood
To the Morning by Dan Fogelberg
Watching the sun
Watching it come
Watching it come up over the rooftops
Cloudy and warm
Maybe a storm
You can never quite tell
From the morning
And it’s going to be a day
There is really no way to say no
To the morning
Yes it’s going to be a day
There is really nothing left to
Say but
Come on morning
Waiting for mail
Maybe a tail
From an old friend
Or even a lover
Sometimes there’s none
But we have fun
Thinking of all who might
Have written.
And maybe there are seasons
And maybe they change
And maybe to love is not so strange
The sounds of the day
They hurry away
Now they are gone until tomorrow
When day will break
And you will wake
And you will rake your hands
Across your eyes
And realize
That it’s going to be a day
There is really no way to say no
To the morning
Yes it’s going to be a day
There is really nothing left to say but
Come on morning
Written and sung by Dan Fogelberg
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