Until Dawn

Different Choices and The Beginning of Winter Routines

Note: Audio version includes farm updates and more unscripted conversation

I didn’t realize the temperature had dropped so low. It was 26° when I woke up and the world was still dark. The black cat kneading my chest woke me. I knew he wanted to get under the covers so I pulled him close. I listened to him purr against my collarbone for a few minutes, my version of hitting snooze. I’m not sure the metaphor works. I haven’t used a morning alarm for over a decade.

I remember reading that in a book once, back in my early 20’s. A woman who had opted out of modern consumerism for a more “radical” life mentioned it off hand, the not using an alarm clock anymore, like it was nothing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt wildly luxurious and dangerously irresponsible.

I was intrigued.

I had been raised in a home with an alarm clock practically embedded in my cerebral cortex. My parents worked and my two sibling and I all went to school together. By the time I was 14, mornings were a chorus of alarms from different bedrooms getting ready for work and school. I remember the chaos of sharing a bathroom with four people, all of us rushing out the door, the safety and routine of a small town life.

I remember when I had to be at school, and having to show up to summer jobs on time. After graduation I had to make 8AM college classes while juggling part-time work. After that I went off and worked for a television network and clothing brands, all of them serious places with serious business hours. I lived and died by alarms. Now the only intrusive beeping I hear comes from my oven timer or if there’s a fire.

Turns out, like most things I was warned about, morning alarms are not a status marker. They don’t mean you’re retired and comfortable or unemployed and destitute. It just means you don’t want to wake on command.

Setting alarms was another modern necessity living alone in the middle of the woods on a farm didn’t require. And I stopped looking at it as the luxury of my irresponsibility (which was what the most miserable people on the internet would tell me) to a perk I was paying for in spades. For all the people who wish they never had to wake up to an alarm again, there is a very small percentage that would prefer a life of heating their house by hand or chasing escaped pigs in the woods.

Sometimes I ache for a different life. One where I wake up in a house that’s warm, and if I want it warmer I just push some buttons and pay more money. I get a hot shower, in FEBRUARY, like in the Jetsons, and then get into my luxury midsized SUV and commute with an $8 coffee listening to a podcast while I mentally prepare for my presentation on the efficacy of calls to action at the footer of a promotional email compared to the header. I imagine myself picking up that venti peppermint mocha with a triple shot from an unnecessarily sleek hidden cupholder in a car with a touch screen and taking a…

*sip*

But I snap out of it. I realize I am not driving to work in the cold hours before dawn in some midsized city. I’m not her, the version of me still working at HGTV, probably a lead designer by now, 22 years into my career… No, I am in my pink and purple bedroom, head buried under a green velvet duvet I had to save up for the way my friends save up for weekends at the Cape, holding a cat against my ribs who is already asleep. Soon as I remove these covers, the cocoon of comfort will burst open. Hot air will swirl like a cloud over my body from the steam of sleeping naked beside an open window in a hard frost.

Time to get up and start another day on the farm.

I dress fast. I head downstairs in my work clothes, a layering system used for four-season backpacking that works swimmingly in my living room in October. Against my skin is synthetic underwear, boxer briefs and bra, never made of cotton. Over that is a silk, long-sleeved base layer from my hiking days, a thin fleece, joggers (also not cotton), wool socks, and a beanie. I am dressed for the basecamp that is my living room. Time to start work, and that means cultivating heat and light.

I make my way downstairs. The house is dark, save for some electric tea lights in jack-o-lanterns scattered around the house. I did okay with my pumpkins this year. About twenty grew to carvable size and over the last few weeks I have been making them for friends and giving away Jacks like party favors. To me, it’s endearing. But I realize to some folks I am just handing them a rotting night light. But at 4:30 in the morning, they look charming and adorable. Friendly faces in the dark.

I light a few candles in the black. They are all around the stove, for exactly this reason. The first light and heat I make each day is a candle in the dark. I am a dramatic bitch. Also, my eyes are really sensitive to light. If I were to flip on the bathroom or kitchen’s horrific overhead lighting a few minutes after waking, I would be temporarily blinded. It’s painful at best, and entirely unnecessary, so like a morning alarm I don’t use it.

By candlelight—dressed like I’m about to head out for a day of hiking to the next shelter on the AT—I crouch before the fire with kindling and leftover candle wax inside a ball of newspaper, my impromptu fire starter. Soon the living room is lit up with orange and yellow flames. The thermometer in the front room says 51° inside, which is pretty standard for 4AM in late October when the fire has been out for 7 hours. My body isn’t hardened to the cold mornings yet. My feet still feel cold and I need coffee.

In the gentle flickering light of my morning, I feed my cats and dog. I forgot to mention that during this entire old-timey fire-starting routine there is a dog pawing my thighs like she hasn’t eaten since Murphy Brown’s last episode aired and cats are weaving around my feet yelling for their brown circles. Once everyone is fed, Friday let out to pee, and coffee is made - it’s time to go the second-best thing to more sleep: a slow morning.

There are hours to go before dawn, which is when I start the real work of the day, so this is my time. Even if I was commuting to an off-farm job and not walking outside to feed pigs and sheep, I’d still want this quiet time before the world wakes up.

I feel empowered. I have already started my day building a fire and procuring a hot beverage. Accomplishments, even small ones, ornament your confidence. I did this so far *takes sip* so I can find a way to do the next thing, come sunrise. But not right now. Right now I need to melt into this chrysalis *pulls blanket tighter* and emerge once I’m damn good and ready.

Between 4-7AM will write, watch a movie, or read. Sometimes I click on a lo-fi music station that matches the weather and season and do yoga. But on cold mornings like this I am wrapped in a blanket sipping dangerously strong coffee and watching Jennifer’s Body beside orange flames. My content dog’s head in my lap, petting the fur around the ruff of her neck while Megan Fox struts on screen. Everything feels warmer. Anything feels possible.

I don’t use an alarm because it feels like a lifetime ago that I was capable of sleeping in, or even had the option. I needed it as a child in school and young adult with an office job. Sleep was easy. But since 2021, my anxiety has me awake at 3AM, and it is impossible to fall back asleep once I’m awake and aware of my situation. I’ve got ten days to earn a mortgage payment or the farm is in risk of foreclosure. Sales all month are less than what I used to make in a weekend last year. It is terrifying.

I think a lot of people would want this life. Not necessarily the cold and the chores, but the idea of trading convenience for more agency. I don’t think we ache for Keurig cups and mid-sized SUVs. We ache for purpose.

*sip*

We ache for a life without alarms. Until we get it. Then we pace in the dark wishing we had a conference call to make at 9:30 and was planning a weekend in NYC around my Christmas bonus. I know that if I stayed on the course I was prescribed, I would have certain advantages. I do not think I would be happy. I think I would become something else entirely and I don’t think she would have bought a farm, quit her job, or ever came out. I’d be in some sexless, tired, partnership with a guy I was friends with (that I convinced myself was romance) and I’m not sure that version of me could ever wake up without alarms. Why would I even want to wake up?

I don’t see my mornings as waking up in a cold house facing hard work under the threat of foreclosure. I see my morning as the insanely-good luck to wake up in this exact moment in time, in this exact place, with this exact blessing of chance and opportunity to even try to attempt this life in the first place. I can’t think of many pockets in the Common Era where a childless gay woman can own property, practice witchcraft, talk about it publicly, and not be burned alive for it.

But here I am! Living my 42nd year on a farm among the angry embers of a planet about to burst into flames. Yet I landed in a place hundreds of feet above sea level, far from floods and protected by mountains. A place where fresh water comes right out of the ground. Where I learned to grow food, ride a horse, shoot, hunt, chop food, mend and make due. It’s been a very public and very embarrassing uphill clawing with sticky feelings coating everything like glitter, but that’s me.

And I love this version of me.

I think we’re a species that confuses common with normal and normal with good. My life isn’t common, but waking up with anxiety at 3AM certainly is. And there’s a very good chance had I not rolled the dice on this farm and played it safe, Creative Director Jenna would still be laying awake at 3AM, not worried about losing her farm but worried that she never bought one. That I spent these decades of strong back and sharp wit at a desk when I could have been forging my writing under the pressure of survival and making ends meet like a fucking Oregon trail pioneer with one wagon wheel about to fall off…

I’m not sure any of us ever win at life. We simply make different choices and pay for them, over and over. I won’t be setting an alarm before bed tonight, but I’ll be up again before dawn trying to cling to whatever matters and feels safe while the news shows more images of war, famine, destruction, and chaos. And instead of wondering what it’s like sitting by the Rhine, I offer a moment of silence for the version of me that already knows.

That being said, I still strongly suggest slow mornings by candlelight with Megan Fox. You sure as hell could do worse. I’ll tell you that much for free.

*sip*

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Good Luck, Babe.

Not into design, meat, soap, or paying for substack subscriptions? I get that. It’s not something I do much of either. And if you aren’t interested in ever typing 16 digits into your screen to support my writing, feel free to send a one-time tip if that’s more your style and that’s something you want to do.

And if none of this is persuasive, then I thank you for your time and hope you keep reading! I’ll figure this out. I always have. But I gotta try every single avenue, including special offers on Sunday mornings.

Thank you, Regardless! Try that apple cake darling, it’s smashing.

Thanks Darlin’

-j