On the strange luxury of a quiet kitchen, an old kettle, and a notebook still mostly empty.
There is a particular kind of morning that belongs entirely to you. Not stolen, not rushed — just the hour before the rest of the house remembers itself.
I have been waking at six for three months now, not out of discipline but out of greed. The kitchen at that hour is a different room: quieter, cooler, the light still pink at the window. The kettle goes on. The notebook comes out.
I rarely write anything worth keeping in that hour. Mostly it is inventory — what I noticed yesterday, what I am thinking about, what I ate for dinner. But occasionally, something useful surfaces. A sentence that had been hiding. The beginning of an idea.
The writer Anne Lamott calls them "morning pages." I call mine "before anyone asks me anything." The name matters less than the practice.