What’s your favorite time of day?

Dusk, sunset. The onset of evening.

The magic hour. 

Where light dances with cloud and horizon, scattering into soft warms and intense cools in dramatic, painterly brushstrokes across everything seen and unseen. Then Venus appears.

There’s a peace, a calm that settles with the afternoon / evening interlude. Birds  rustle and settle ready to sleep. Then bats appear, and owls ghost by. Later, possums run along fence tops to feed. Finally, the day is properly done.

The long light of late Autumn afternoons casting shadows that stretch like the day does, hitting the edges of the unknown world, before settling into the slow welcome of oncoming night.

But this time is also an end that is quietly beautiful, a finish that is too easy to miss unless you bother. These are the kind of endings I’ve never had enough of. The endings in my life have been painful, difficult, sudden, or unexpected, and decidedly lacking in peace and beauty. Many of my endings have been inconclusive wrenchings, shocks, rather than passings. Thus, a gentle dusk, when day passes into night’s prelude in stark colours that soften and fade as the quiet seeps in, offer a transitory but welcome respite from the harsh light of everything else.