We are on the front porch at dusk, and I am trying hard to be peaceful and think poetic thoughts. Here are people strolling by, their pace slowed by this reflective time of day. If they are holding hands, their grasp is loosened from what it might be in afternoon. It isn’t from lack of affection, I think, but rather from acknowledgment of some primal fact of our essential aloneness, which darkness always seems to me to bring out. There are the house lights coming on—here, then there, warm yellow squares that always remind me of coming-in time when I was a kid. There are Necco wafer colors in the sky, the last show before night falls and the clouds thin and the breeze picks up and the mighty street lights come on. Stars might or might not come out; sometimes they won’t answer to a knock at their dressing room door. I lean back into my wicker chair and start a long exhale. The leaves on the service berry tree and the weeping cherry in front of my house are all still; they seem like a painting of themselves. And then Austin starts barking like a canine machine gun and this conversation ensues:
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