I wake to heeler dogs in my wake. Bob tails wagging. All toothy smiles. Being bump bumped bumped by black noses in a not very subtle attempt to herd me toward the kitchen. Their black lips are pulled back in the crack of dawn question about where's my breakfast?

I make school lunches sometime around 5:30 AM. Thank god for Trader Joe's, I mutter to myself I can't tell you how many mornings while I wait for the first cup of hot coffee to course through my veins. I wonder how many more peanut butter sandwiches I will make in my lifetime? How many have I made already?

Red Dawg asks politely for one of those organic chicken quesadillas I'm wrapping up in foil right now if you don't mind, to which I respond with an equally polite no. I am barely aware of the fact that my kitchen is carpeted in heeler dogs as I step across them to stoke the fire in the woodburning stove.

I walk to the barn greeted by the bellowing and hollering of no, not cows, but four cranky mares and one very large Percheron gelding. They snuffle my arms and my hands with their muzzles, one at a time, letting me know that they think they are starving and may die from malnutrition just about any moment now if I don't get a move on.

How many bales of hay have I tossed into that feeder, I ask myself, as I'm hissing at the horses like a she-devil goose to give me some breathing room puh-LEEEEEEse while I attempt to shove an 80-pound bale of hay through one of those little openings on the side of the feeder because I can't exactly lift it over my head and toss it in there. Oh, and did I mention it's still dark?

Although there is a moon. Beautiful, beautiful thing. I stop and stare at her a moment.

Wild-eyed barn cats are actually visible this morning beneath tractor wheels, behind a wheelbarrow, in the rafters. Waiting. Waiting for their breakfast. Licking their chops. They might consider eating me if I don't hurry.

And it strikes me that while I am many things, I am undoubtedly, unequivocably, irrevocably, and always The Chuck Wagon around these parts.

Come and get it.