"My favorite time to be in our garden is the time before you can even see it. The time between four and five in the morning.

"You cannot see the garden yet; it is still hidden in shadows. It rests in the dark, waiting for the sun and for the day to start.

"I like to be there then — sitting, listening for the symphony that will come, watching for the light that has been promised, waiting for the show to begin. I am astonished and grateful each time to have been plopped down into this little corner of the Eden given again to us all each day.

"Most mornings I do not need the clock to wake me up. I find myself awake well before the alarm, lying in bed in the dark, waiting until a reasonable hour to rise. Reasonable is a relative term, or so I am told by those who cannot believe that I rise that early.

"I remember Pop saying he used to lie in bed in the dark, waiting for the sun to come up so he could get out of bed. Being a high-school student at the time, I thought he was crazy. Now I realize he was only middle-aged, an age I seem to have reached myself sometime ago. Middle-aged strikes me as a relative term; I do not think it likely I will live to be 108.

"There are some good things about being my age and some not-so-good ones. Going out the screen door and down the steps into the garden, I remember that being up in the dark and waiting on the light clearly ranks as one of the good things.

"According to the Ancient Story, 'Let there be light' is all it took to begin to create the first of all places to which anyone ever belonged, the first of all the Edens. This is as close as I am going to get, I think as I start along the path toward the studio.

"I open the double doors, set my coffee cup down, and take a seat facing out into the garden. Then I wait for the symphony to begin and the light to come up and the set to be revealed and the characters to appear on stage.

"The opening notes of each day's symphony are percussion.

"The fountain splashes down into a pool lined with small rocks I hauled home from retreats over the years. Certain rocks call to mind certain places and times. Better yet, they call to mind those who shared those days and moments with me. I think of it as a photo album, except that all of the pictures of these people and these places to which I belonged for a time are kept only in my heart.

"The fountain pings and plops, ringing like a bell. On mornings with a breeze, the ringing mingles with the sound of the wind chimes.

"The next sounds in the symphony come from inside the hedges. The hedges hold the nests of the birds who call our yard home. Chirps and cheeps and whistles and calls fill the air, a whole reed section tuning up for the day's work.

"A mockingbird lives in the maple tree. His specialty is to mimic the beep, beep, beep sound the security system makes when I come out the back door. More than once I have been sitting in my studio and heard it and looked up to see who was coming out into the back garden at this hour. This particular mockingbird particularly enjoys mocking me. He also imitates the squeak the screen door makes when I need to oil the hinges, a useful practice that almost makes up for his less-than-respectful general attitude toward me.

"House finches are next, noisy folks who travel in packs and chatter a mile a minute with no regard as to whether the other finches are listening to them at all. A family reunion or an argument or a food fight roars to life every other minute with them. In between their frenetic bursts, you can hear the deep-throated calls of mourning doves as they make their stately strolls across the yard. The wrens who live under the studio roof are usually the last of the birds to join in the song. I do not know if wrens sleep late everywhere, but they do in our yard."