My companions as dawn breaks this Sunday morning are the birds serenading me and the rabbit breaking his fast on the clover scattered across my yard.

I sit above the fray, listening to Lay, Lady, Lay, Dylan’s most melodious singing of his career. A little blackbird with a luminescent sheen perches on the high railing, looks left, then right, flicks his tail like cocking a gun, and flies straight toward the elm that needs felling.

Now James Taylor croons Handy Man. My coffee has gone cold, the morning’s meds have finally kicked in, and only the faintest remnants remain of the pain that stretched from the crown of my head to the toes of my left foot, letting me find no solace no matter which way I turned.

Carly Simon finishes singing the joys of marrying, and Joni Mitchell gleefully protests the paving of paradise.

My day is young, and I am ready to meet it, bathed in the dew this dawn has brought, sung to by the neighborhood’s winged cherubs and the troubadours of my past.

A warm mix of then and now