Today was so pretty with its robin egg blue sky and hot yellow sunshine. Love Marcus Tullius Cicero’s quote, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Two of my favorite things, gardens and books. Enjoyed my morning’s gardening and bird feeder chores listening to the happy songbirds’ symphonies. After I cleaned the bird baths and their fountains, Fatty and one of his squirrel friends hopped up for a drink of water. I love watching the squirrels on the bird baths. They stand tall, surveying the landscape, then drink deeply before they hop off. I got hot watering my gardens and drank from the hose pipe like I did as a child, holding the nozzle straight up, letting the water bubble up like a water fountain. The water was cold and tasted like childhood memories.

Youngest son put an ornamental metal fence around my flower garden this morning. Hopefully the fence will deter the night critters and keep Penelope and the cats out, too. Course they can hop over it but it looks pretty and makes me happy. I’m still seeing the groundhog in the yard next door but he’s leaving my garden alone after two of his digging visits last week. Penelope did a tinkle where he dug his hole so maybe that’s keeping him away. When I get my garden lady scarecrow placed back in the flower garden I’m spraying some peppermint oil on her apron to deter the critters.

The sunset was so beautiful tonight in its simplistic elegance. The sun was the color of an old silver coin beaming her rays straight across the evening’s horizon. Father Sky was dressed in a formal tuxedo in the color of a copper penny as he escorted the sun down the pageant runway. As the sun stepped on the stage where the backdrop of vanilla cream and pale blue clouds hung, Mother Nature stroked her watercolors in soft wildflower honey across the landscape and painted a low burning orange wildfire that softly blazed across the landscape. When the sun turned out her lights, twilight began to creep across the neighborhood and the wildfire of sunset burned itself out leaving a soft scattering of the sun’s rays, hovering over my neighborhood, magical in its beauty,. Father Sky waked the moon and the stars and hung them high in the inky blackness of the night sky. The day says goodbye as the night says hello.

If you’ve ever just sat and watched twilight tiptoe across the landscape you know what a beautiful thing it is to witness. The sun drops down behind the horizon and a quietness descends on the land as the day quietly sheds its light. Twilight is defined as the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon, caused by the refraction and scattering of the sun’s rays from the atmosphere. Lucy Maud Montgomery writes, “Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star.” I just define twilight as magic. The time of day when the fairies and lighting bugs wake and the trees are silhouetted in dark blackness against the horizon. The birds leave the feeders and the street gets quiet. A few hoots from the old neighborhood hoot owl and then night covers the land like a well loved quilt.

That’s when I leave the porch and come in to my desk. As I sit and began to write I hear the lone song of a lonely mockingbird gloriously singing for a mate in the bamboo forest. Then the freight train wails a loud long whistle echoing down the tracks, chugging the night’s darkness with it. The day is bedded down and God has blessed me in so many ways this day. God is with us as the twilight turns to darkness. He is safely by our side as we say our prayers and lay our heads down tonight. God is the “light of the world” and he will call us out of the darkness. “In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human successes, but on how well we have loved,” Saint John of the Cross.

“Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark!” — Alfred Lord Tennyson