Been reading quotes today. Never get tired of them. I’m thinking about inspiration and sitting here trying to read what I’ve scribbled on the back of a junk mail envelope. I’m notorious about writing down quotes and sentences while I’m reading books and magazines. I just grab a scrap of paper nearby and scribble it down. Course most of the time I can’t read my own handwriting and have to search for the quote on the internet.

I read a biography once about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley. There was a quote by Ernest Hemingway on the cover of the book. “I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her.” They had a beautiful love story. She and Ernest loved to read novels and then discuss them. Chief and I did this a lot before we married. Anyway, every time I came across a book title the Hemingways shared in her biography, I’d write it down, thinking Chief and I could read them. Finished her biography and went to the city library to check out the books the Hemingways had read. Course the city library didn’t have any of them. So off I traipse to the junior college’s new library to check them out. Years before, when I first moved to Alexander City, I checked out books from the college library all the time. Anyway, I’m informed at the library desk I can’t use the new library unless I’m enrolled in the college. So home unhappily I go. This was years before Amazon…I’d order the books now. I might read her biography again and do that!

Found another quote tonight that speaks to me. This one is by Harper Lee. “The tradition of the South is not urban… I think we are a region of story tellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertained each other by talking.” This quote made me think about the screen doors on front porches and all the conversations that took place and still do on Southern porches. Tracy Lawrence sang, “If the world had a front porch like we did back then, we’d still have our problems, but we’d all be friends…”

As a child I loved to listen to my parents talking on the front porch after supper, later going to sleep lulled by their quiet conversations and the swing chain squeaks. When I first went to work with Chief, he’d invite me to supper at his house on lots of Friday nights and his whole family and I would sit on the porch after supper till the deep dark of the night set. I loved the conversations and laughter of these porch sittings and got to know his sister and her family and his mother through these visits. My oldest brother is a porch sitter, too. Sits just like daddy did, one leg up in the swing, dragging the other to push the swing easily. My dearest friend is a porch sitter and we love long porch visits at her house and mine. I find God in the swing on my front porch and in the beauty of the conversation around me.

Sometimes I think the delicate light of twilight is the most beautiful part of the day. I’m walking Penelope now and I can’t ignore the mystical romance of the day’s light getting dim and ethereal. The day is quietly getting ready for bed dressing in his night clothes. The birds are roosting in the trees, talking quietly as the dark creeps softly into the yard where the bird feeders hang with empty posts, quietly swinging from the cardinals quick leavings. A stillness comes over the daylight’s end, the darkness wakes, and the night noises come alive as the moon and stars light up the heavens. I love to sit on the swing as the night arrives in its black velvet darkness. Too cold for porch pondering these days, though.

I didn’t watch the sunset pageant tonight but I did watch Mother Nature prepare the stage, flooding the horizon in a honeycomb colored wash of golden watercolors. I decided the sun would choose to be dressed tonight in a luxurious evening gown of hot pink taffeta, embellished and shimmering with silver crystals and golden sequins. The gown’s long ruffled train, fitted tightly and dropping from the sun’s tiny waist, flares out its rays across the horizon and paints the sky a blazing flame-pink hue. Walking down the stage, the train of her gown pales the horizon to a light peach glow.

Father Sky, dressed in his flannel lined jeans and Carhartt canvas barn coat, escorts the sun down the horizon kissing the sun’s cheek as she turned off the day’s light. Father Sky tucks the sun in under her velvet vanilla quilt of honeycomb clouds and leaves her to perform his task of waking the moon and stars. He pulls the moon and stars out of the thick heavy clouds into the quiet navy dark of the nighttime sky, letting the stars punctuate the sky as they dance in the moon’s luminous glow. Father Sky’s duties done for the night, he heads to his library to relax with a crystal lowball tumbler of bourbon and a Cuban cigar.

Maybe I’ll watch the sunset tomorrow, a gift ending another day of heaven on Earth. I always see romance in the dark night sky.

“I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise.” — Anne Brontë