Interrupting Breakfast

Timber creeks beneath bare feet, splintering the silent scene viewed from the weathered front porch. Night’s brushed with hues from Morning’s pastel palette. Bristling breezes echo against the steel-blue drum of the heavens and rustle through canopies of wooden brush drumsticks. Coffee warms like sunlight, piercing beaded rain that dots blades of emerald grass; saturating slow-warming air with the familiar fragrance of the forest’s terpene tonic. Pine needles crackle beneath the hooves of elk, dining on foliage lacing the gnarled branches of manzanita trees. The screen door squeaks and the elk freeze — watching me, watching them.