A Winter Morning in Bed

A Winter Morning of Kashmir in Bed

The world outside is still wrapped in darkness, a deep indigo that hasn’t yet decided to become dawn. I’m buried under layers of blankets, warm and heavy with sleep, when it begins: the first faint chirp. Then another. And another. Soft, deliberate, impossibly bright notes slipping through the frozen air.

It’s winter. The kind of cold that makes the windowpanes blush with frost, the kind that turns your breath into little ghosts. By all logic, everything should be silent. The trees are bare, the ground is hard, and most creatures have either flown south or burrowed deep. And yet, here they are—these tiny winter birds—singing like it’s the first day of spring.

Their voices are not loud. They don’t need to be. In the stillness of a winter morning, every sound is amplified. Each chirp lands like a drop of water on still glass: clear, pure, startlingly alive. It’s a delicate sound, almost fragile, as if the cold might shatter it. But it doesn’t. It keeps going, threading through the dark, pulling the day gently toward light.

I lie there, eyes half-open, listening. There’s something deeply charming about it—this quiet rebellion against the season. While the rest of the world sleeps in, resigned to gray skies and short days, these little ones are already awake, already singing. Not out of obligation, not for an audience, but simply because that’s what they do when the night starts to loosen its grip.

I don’t know their names. Maybe sparrows, maybe chickadees, maybe something braver that refused to leave when the others did. It doesn’t matter. In this moment, they are the sound of hope wearing feathers. They are proof that even in the heart of winter, something warm is stirring.

The sky begins to pale. A thin line of rose appears at the edge of the curtain. The birds keep singing, softer now, as if they know the sun is coming to take over the shift.

I pull the blanket a little higher, smile into the pillow, and let their voices carry me gently into the day.

Winter may be cold, but this morning, it sounds like music.