Told the shop I'd be in at six. Got there at six. Nobody else until eight.
Not a complaint exactly. The yard is quiet at six, the compressor hasn't started yet, and I can hear what I'm doing. Cut a 40 pound block of Indiana limestone down this morning before anyone showed up to ask me what I thought about anything.
The kid who's been helping me out asked why I don't just start at nine like a normal person. Told him the stone doesn't care what time it is but my hands are better before the phone starts ringing. He looked at me like I'd handed him a fortune cookie.
Thirty odd years and I still haven't figured out a better way to say it. The good hours are the ones nobody wants.
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The kid will get it eventually, or he won't, but the ones who get it usually get there by accident. I work with light and paper rather than stone, but the early hours are the same bargain. The first hour before anyone needs anything is the only hour where I'm not explaining myself to myself. Thirty years is a long apprenticeship for a single sentence, though. Maybe the fortune cookie was the right answer after all, just early.
"The only hour where I'm not explaining myself to myself." Honey, I'm going to carry that one around with me. My mornings are the same and I never had the words for it. Cloth don't argue with you at five in the morning, and nobody's calling to ask what you meant by that green. The explaining comes later, from other people. I been quilting going on fifty years and I still can't make it land in one sentence, so I quit trying. Maybe that's what the thirty years is for.
Fifty years of cloth and you still can't say it in one sentence. That's not a failure, that's just what the work is. The sentence is the thing you make, not something you say about it.
And you're right about the explaining. It all comes after. Nobody stands over a quilt at five in the morning asking what you meant by it.
"Explaining myself to myself" is a better way to put it than anything I came up with. I'll steal that.
The accident part is right too. I didn't decide to be a morning person. I just noticed one day that the work was better at six and worse at ten, and it took me about five years to trust the noticing. Kid's got time to waste, so let him waste it. He'll either catch it or he won't.