I throw the porch rooster off his perch when he starts crowing in the morning.

It’s not really his fault that he crows early…our neighbor has a big security light that looks like the sun turned down a few notches.  It’s confusing for a rooster to sleep in the artificial daylight.

He wakes up early, I wake up earlier, and when I hear him start to crow, I throw him off the porch before he can wake everyone else up.

It’s one of the many aspects of my comforting routine that have become both…comforting and routine.

This morning, when I picked him up to aim him toward the grass below and set him free to do his awkward rooster flight to freedom, the rooster veered.

He almost flew into the minivan.

What the heck?!  I set him up to have the same kind of experience he has every morning…a flapping, squawking combination of falling and flying down to the ground below.  It should have been the same as every morning we spend together.

But he veered and for a moment things got more exciting for the rooster than either of us expected.

“What were you thinking?! YOU COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED!!!!”

If I were the rooster’s father, I might say something like that to him when I made him hand me the car keys.

Roosters do what they do.  This particular rooster is like a dog…follows us around and gets in the way. I can’t really teach him how to behave.  I am not a “rooster whisperer”.  I am not Dr. Doolittle.

He’s beautiful in the way a rooster can be beautiful, though…kind of prehistoric, really, if you get a chance to ponder just what’s going on with those rooster legs and those lizard like eyes.

Take a good look next time you get a chance to spend time with a rooster.  They’re kind of weird-looking.

It’s strange to get used to such a big bird hanging around.

I don’t really know what made him veer this morning.  Maybe it was some new atmospheric anomaly, something in the wind…barometric pressures that only he could feel.

Maybe he just hadn’t really had a chance to wake up yet?  Maybe he was having a weird rooster dream that confused him…got him off course.

Who knows what a rooster is up to.

But who can blame him for veering a little when the routine can be so jarring and strange.

It’s an odd way to wake up in the morning.  To have something quite a bit bigger than you pick you up and throw you off something…whether you could fly or not…would be an odd way to start the day.

They’re getting ready…and when I say “they’re”, I mean the USPS…to do what they call a “duo” to our office.

A “duo” is when they combine offices in order to save money.

They move the drivers from one office to another office…and then “let” the drivers deliver out of that new office.

We still deliver to the same boxes, but we start at an office that’s far away from our route.

The new office is in another town…down a twisty mountain road.  It’s a fairly long drive to get there.

This saves the post office money.

Somehow.

I guess that the big move is going to happen sometime next week.  Some folks are coming to talk with us this morning about what’s going down in a couple of days.

I don’t know what was going on with that rooster this morning, but I feel like veering, too, after all the changes in the air.

There’s a great bakery across the road from our “new” Post Office, though.

Maybe veering off course isn’t always a bad thing.