The Quality of Light

As the light fades and colors deepen, I look out my window at my tree. The squirrels are settling in for the night, climb into their warm nests, and the sky is gray, but the horizon is a luminous white. The edges of the vista blur and the mountains dim and darken, growing larger, a backdrop of rock and trees and stability. The view softens with the coming of night but the tree outside my window is solid and clear and the details are sharply defined. The rain today settles into the cracks in the bark. The tree breathes in the moisture, forcing the alligator skin bark into painstaking relief.

The horizon glows with the sun's descent and the wind picks up rattling loose branches from their connections, twigs and leaves dipping and ripping from their moors and floating to the ground. Darkness closes in and everything right outside the window is delineated and defined.

There is a quality to dusk that blurs the edges of the view as it creeps closer, settling in like a lover's arms in an intimate embrace. Color flees and silhouettes take solid form out of the riot of daylight.

Dusk.

And soon night...

...when the stars flare and fly across the vault of heaven, and the moon's pale silver face lightly blues the darkness.