I have no memory of this.  I have very few memories of anything that happens before 9 or 10 a.m., it's all a sleepy, miserable blur.  On those mornings when I have been required to rise early, I have been known to fall asleep while walking, while talking, while driving, while attending important meetings at work (resulting in a lot of drool on my notepad.  Not a way to impress the boss).  When I was still working in an office, I would often have to disappear into the bathroom to take a five minute nap in private, after my boss objected to naps taken at my desk or on my computer screen.  And this after 4 or 5 cups of coffee.

I just don't do mornings.  I'm like the anti-Nike slogan:  Just DON'T do it.

So, here we are in Costa Rica, on the outskirts of the largest city in the country.  Of course we have neighbors:  chickens.

"Oh, how sweet and rural," you think as you see them pecking cheerfully away under the swings at the playground, or fluttering into the brightly colored tropical foliage after some noxious tropical insect, or perching proudly on top of a wall.

You know what I think when I see those chickens?  Chicken Soup.  For my soul.

I have never before wished violence on another living creature -- I can't even stand to squash bugs (Well, I'll swat mosquitoes, but as harbingers of death, they don't count).  But these chickens.... I lie awake at night dreaming of ways they could meet their end.

And why am I lying awake at night and into the wee hours of the morning?  The rooster is on an hour timer.

Never having lived with chickens myself (aside from the few times I visited my grandparents growing up), I was not well acquainted with this aspect of their personality.  Like most people of my generation, I believed what the nursery rhyme tells us:

Although, since I've already found reason to disagree strongly with the second part, I should have had my suspicions about the integrity of the first part of this little bit of wit and wisdom.

Cock does not crow in the morn.  Or, more specifically, he does crow in the morn, but he doesn't stop there.  He crows in the morn, at noontime, at even time, at night time, and most especially at that time that's after night and before morning when no sane person should be doing anything but communing with his pillow.  That's when cock crows.

Our house is quite solidly  built of concrete to withstand monsoon, earthquake and flood.  No problem.  The windows are the problem.  They're just a thin pane of glass and all outside sounds sound like they are actually inside with you.  And since the rooster lives just on the other side of our wall, I feel like he's right in bed with me.  All night long.

My kids have noticed this too, and have been waking up at odd times:  3 a.m; 4:30 a.m; 5 a.m.  They think it's time to go for the day and don't go back to sleep.  Especially the little one.  You can imagine how happy this makes me.

But, I've kept all these thoughts to myself, thinking that since I'm a foreigner here and a gringa to boot, I'd better just find a way to gracefully accustom myself to the way things are done here.

And then I talked to my landlord, a native Tico, the other day.  We were outside and heard the rooster, and Don Manuel (a very gentlemanly, soft-spoken man) cursed fluidly in English and in Spanish.