Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky. When I was a boy, our family occasionally attended services known as Evening Prayer, which I remember as a time of winding down, a delicious feeling of relaxation at the end of a long and busy day. It was a time to be alone with one's thoughts, a time for that small inner voice to be heard. Now, at the end of our century, opportunities for near-solitary quietude, for thankful completion of a day drawing to a close, seem lost in the millennial shuffle. It is a time when the comfort of being in repose, alone or in the company of a loved one, stirs senses at full alert to the dusky changes slowly enveloping us.
Bird song is stilled and crickets begin their nightly chorus.
Day flowers close as those of the dark slowly open. The whispered passage of a bat tells it is out on the first of its nightly forays in pursuit of mosquitoes and moths flying invisibly overhead. A cerulean sky turns dark and deepens further into blackness that is only a little paler than the pitch black of nearby forest. The night lights up, first with brilliant planets, then with bright stars, followed by those of diminishing magnitude. A sweater feels good.