Twilight

Simple Pleasures


I just came back in from another pool expedition.

This time was spent watching twilight arrive. Jupiter, Saturn, or Venus (one of the big bright planets) was hanging low in the eastern sky and I enjoyed watching the color of the horizon change from black to various lighter shades of blue.

Most people forced into the 9 to 5 routine never get to see the sights I see several times each week. We’re coming up on the summer solstice—the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere—later this month and then it’s downhill from there.

I love and hate the event (summer solstice), knowing that we’re headed back toward the inevitable 5:45 PM sunsets and the associated psychotic melancholy.

I grew up spending weekends and weeks during the summer on my mother’s father’s farm in rural south Alabama in the 1960’s and came to appreciate the early morning hours, although I personally didn’t have much use for them at the time.

My, my, how times have changed.

Since then I’ve learned to maximize the morning and evening twilight, having taken hundreds of photographs and stored away thousands of mental images of waxing and waning landscapes and vistas through the years.

You haven’t lived until you’ve set alone on a fall day on a boat in Blackwater Sound next to Key Largo, without another boat in sight, as your vessel swings on its anchor line from sunset to sunrise, swatting mosquitoes and sipping Margaritas as God paints an infinite number of images into the heavens.

Speaking of simple pleasures, my raw peanuts are boiling, and it's time to go check them to see if they're done.


Goober Peas, anyone?