Twilight

Twilight Moves Her So

In an instant it happened, the ivory-yellow page of the opened book flashed a bright, intense white.  The sun, having made its way all day long across the azure sky, had reached the point of the study window and its warm rays shot into the room and upon the pages of the old, hard-covered novel.  She smiled, this was the sweetest time of day, and she closed the book she had held in her lap in the old rocking chair.  She turned her face towards the sun, feeling its warmth, letting it touch her, letting it penetrate her skin.  She closed her eyes, let the story-line etch into her memory so that she could return to it at a later time.  Then, she let her mind go blank, empty except for the translation of the sun’s heat into an emotion, one which has no name, no word to describe it, a feeling.

This time of day, her favorite time, brought colors to the western horizon that only painters could describe accurately. The cloud’s underbellies were illuminated with hues that merged and separated between their layers and billowing puffs, intensities of indigos, pinks, orange and reds, colors beyond description.  She stood, alone, amongst the bird-sounds, the melodic trill-tweet of a red-winged blackbird, the keet-teet of the killdeer that now raised their babes in the under-shadows of the lush, emerald green alfalfa.  Barn swallows dipped and rose and dipped again over the pastures, little aerial acrobats in flight.  The gentle breeze toyed with her hair, played with her skirt that swirled around her ankles, cooled her, warmed her, then send a tingle up her spine.  And, she waited.

The lingering, the anticipation was what she sought, the unfolding, the revealing of the moment when the sun touched the horizon, ending the day, beginning the night.  That time, between day and night, between light and darkness, the pausing in suspension of the two worlds, that was what she ached to inhale.   Nature holding its breath, ever so shortly, before surrendering itself into blackness.  And, it happened, as it had for the millennia before, and she drank it in.

And then, in the twilight, she stood. Azure turning to cobalt then indigo and black.  And, while she stood in the grass now cooling her feet, the first fireflies began to dance and light across the hayfield, first just a few, then more, until countless points of light flickered all around.  Finally, she tilted her head toward the heavens to the stars, bright, faraway worlds filling the night sky.  She closed her eyes, made a wish, as she had done as long as she could remember, chanting the little verse first assisted by her mother when she was just a little girl.  Then, she opened her eyes again, focusing on that one star chosen for the sweet ritual, squeezed her eyes tight once for luck, and felt finally at peace, the day discharged. Her thoughts moved back to the story-line, the people and places created by another to live and breath in the minds of others. She retired back to the inner world, now fulfilled.  Now complete.

copyright 1997