Night Is Here

I had three books, when I was young, whose covers would make a single picture when places side by side. The picture was a drawing of a fading day, with a pink glow in the west, light blue sky above the pink, darker blue above it, and finally deep dark blue in the east.

Those blues that ran into each other from west to east left a flavor on your tongue. They left a smell in your nose. They were the kinds of blues that each must have a name (turquoise, aquamarine, azure, indigo) but I did not know them. Still, they left their mark deeply.

There were mountains and fantastic shaped trees and bats or birds wheeling over a castle. There were gardens and sinuous rills. There were strange creatures crawling the earth. But the dominating feel of the picture was the gradual shift in hue from that pink glow to that deep dark blue.

Outside my window right now, I can see the same sky -- or part of it. As I look east I can see a hint of pink peeking out from behind the house across the street. I know behind the house the sky must be aglow. And above the pink: light blue. And above the light blue, the sky gets darker and darker.

There are no bats wheeling in the night (although I have seen them out there before). And there are no crawling things (although there are albino geckos that hang out sometimes on my screen). And as I have written this, the pinkish west has turned light blue. And the light blue has turned dark. And the dark blue has given way to night. And I know Venus is out there somewhere behind the branches of the trees, and the moon and Mars are walking hand in hand at the top of the heavens.

And so, night is here.

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