The quality of light

As the light fades and colors deepen, I look out my window at the garage roof next door. The squirrels are settling in for the night, climbing into their warm nests above my head where they stomp and race. 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, the fence and garage outside my bedroom window solid and clearly drawn, the details sharply defined. The rain today settles into the cracks in the wood and spill like tears down the warped face that separates me from the mountains. The fence and stones of the garage breathe in the moisture forcing flaws and wrinkles into painstaking relief.

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

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.