Sprinklers Before Sunrise

A sound that is not mine

I wake to water before I wake to light. This is not a poetic arrangement I designed. It is a timer, somewhere close, performing a duty I have not earned and cannot see. The first noise is a pressure, then a spray, then that small mechanical tick that means an arc has reached the end of its permitted generosity and is turning back. I lie there and try to locate it the way you try to locate a leak in a sentence: is it my yard, the next yard, the one beyond the fence that I only know as a silhouette of trees?

Before sunrise the street has not yet assembled its personality. No mowers. No cars performing the brief drama of leaving for work. Just irrigation and, occasionally, a bird that sounds overqualified for the hour. I find this combination more moving than I want to admit, which is usually a sign that I am about to overthink a municipal convenience.

The sprinklers are, in the strict sense, not care. Care implies a witness, or at least an intention happening in real time. A timer is intention that has been outsourced to a clock. I respect the efficiency and distrust the theology. If I water the lawn while I am asleep, can I still count myself as a person who tends a place? Or am I only a person who once, on a better afternoon, aimed the future at 5:12 a.m. and then went inside to become theoretical?

This is a ridiculous question to ask of a sprinkler. I ask it anyway, because I ask it of other automated versions of myself: calendars, reminders, the grocery list that shops in my name. Adulthood keeps offering me devices that will perform my values while I am elsewhere. The values, in this case, are green grass and the avoidance of a dry patch that has already become a character in this journal. The devices do not know that. They know pressure and duration.

Dew, concrete, and the brief rainbow

If I get up, which I do more often now than I used to, the yard is a different country. Dew makes every blade look temporarily wealthy. The air smells like wet soil and the faint rubber of a hose that still has not been coiled, a recurring failure I have decided to treat as a motif rather than a flaw, which is generous of me and unconvincing. Water from the sprinkler hits the concrete in a scatter that will be gone by the time the first car door slams. For a minute, if the angle is lucky, there is a rainbow so small and ordinary it would be embarrassing to photograph.

I do not photograph it. I am trying to be a person who can have a minute without converting it into proof. The rainbow does not need an audience. Neither, frankly, does the lawn. I am the one with the appetite for meaning. The water is only falling where the head was pointed last week, including, with a kind of stupid loyalty, the place that does not need more water and excluding, with equal loyalty, the pale strip by the fence.

There is observational humor in that, if you like your humor dry and slightly against yourself. I set a system to take care of a living surface, and the system faithfully repeats my inaccuracy. Automation does not correct neglect. It scales it. I think about this while standing barefoot on the patio, which is cold, which is information I will forget as soon as the day becomes hot enough to argue with.

A neighbor's sprinkler overlaps mine by a few feet of air. For a while the two sprays perform a duet no one asked for. I find this strangely comforting. Neighborhoods are made of such overlaps: sound, water, the smell of cut grass later in the week, the shared pretense that we are each privately responsible for our own rectangles. Before sunrise the pretense is thinner. We are all just timers and weather.

Whether unseen care still counts

I used to believe that only effort I could feel counted as effort. Sore shoulders after mowing. The particular boredom of pulling weeds. The moral aftertaste of putting tools away. A sprinkler before dawn offers none of that. It is almost stealthy, which makes me suspicious. I have a Puritan streak I do not advertise: if it did not inconvenience me, did it happen?

The grass, again, is not interested in my accounting. It drinks in the dark. It lengthens. It waits for the sun to arrive and make the whole arrangement look like a simple fact rather than a 5 a.m. negotiation. By the time I am fully awake, the only evidence is darker soil, a few remaining beads on the blades, and a sidewalk that dries in the shape of an accident.

I am trying to let this be enough on some mornings. Not as a philosophy of laziness, though I am not above that, but as a truce with the idea that tending a place can include the hours I am not performing. Sleep is not a moral failure. A timer is not a confession of absence, or not only that. Sometimes it is just the least theatrical way to keep roots from becoming a crisis.

And still I get up. I stand in the hiss and the tick and the almost-rainbow, and I let myself be a witness after the fact. I think this is the compromise available to me: I will not pretend that setting a clock is the same as kneeling in the dirt, and I will not pretend that kneeling is the only language a yard understands. The water falls. The dark thins. A truck far away makes the first human noise of the day, and the spell of the unmanned hour begins to end.

When the sprinkler stops, the silence is surprisingly loud. The yard holds the water like a secret it will not keep. I go inside and write this down before the day can rebrand the whole scene as merely irrigation. It was irrigation. It was also the first time since yesterday that I remembered I live somewhere with a sky, a fence, and a clock that keeps working while I do not. That is not salvation. It is a starting time. I can live with a starting time.