A perfect early evening....

This is about yesterday though it might have been about today since the two days were rather seamlessly put together by nature. But it's about yesterday because I got home earlier yesterday and got to notice it all more.

Walking the dog, still bright, not yet seven p.m., I noticed the light. Cornwall is an East/West street--sunrise from Rt. 10, Sunset down the hill toward Prospect. Great light much of the time. Yesterday, stunning.

I sat on our back deck for a long time. It is canopied by hemlock and firs and red oak. You have to look almost straight up to see the sky. And the sky yesterday was the blue of that girl's eyes back in eighth grade. You never kissed her but wished you had for decades. And if you had you would have been lost forever. That blue.

We have a side yard of ferns that are coming up nicely--all ferns and rocks and old tree limbs. The wind moved the ferns feathers slightly. Our deck is assailed on two sides by Rhododendron--state flower of West Virginia, by the way--and the green of the leaves is almost blinding, shiny and deep.

There were birds in the trees and a distant woodpecker who comes every spring and I've never been able to find and see.

Even the aged Horse Chestnut tree I keep thinking is dead is in full leaf. The air felt, tasted, smelled so alive, so sweet--like something called 'forever'.

How many perfect early evenings can we expect in a year or a lifetime? Better grab one when it comes and wrench all the beauty out....

The flowers in our yards and neighbors' yards are all primary colors--reds, oranges, yellows, blue, fluffy cloud white. Not a pastel in sight last evening.

One of the hemlocks has a perfect 'Green Man' on it--I may paint him when I retire so I can see him better and show him to people. He has a long nose and deep eye sockets and a chin that trails away from his mouth.

I had a glass of white wine and smoked a forbidden cigarette and thought things no deeper than something like this: "the light...the light...the light..." for an hour our so.

Our dog slumbered on the deck, his nose under the gate to the front yard. He wasn't even thinking something as weighty as "the light...", he was 'one' with the evening.

It was 53 degrees, I noticed. My favorite temperature yesterday.

Alas--we should all have evenings like that one often....