Morning in Aruba

Morning has perfected itself in Aruba.  Nothing should ever change about sunrise and the first hour thereafter on this island.  The temperature is perfect.  You can step outside in whatever fashion you have risen from your bed.

The sun begins soft and small as a marshmallow before expanding and rising up into a golden sky.  Then, across the elevated neighborhoods, roosters call from yellow stucco houses with red tile roofs and from pink stucco houses with green tile roofs.  Songbirds, whose faces and names I don’t know, answer the domestic birds in elaborate, fluting songs while perched atop stucco fences and tall cactus stands gently swaying in the never ending trade wind.

And often, in the first hour, puffy clouds that have spent the whole of night lazing just off shore, extend white arms and flushed fingers to the center of the island, delivering brief, glittering sun-showers just like the ones I love to watch as they fall cross the open prairies of Montana.

All this before most of the island begins to stir, before small craft stretch their whitewater tails across the sheltered aquamarine seawaters.

 

-- Mitchell Hegman