|simple life
Summer twilight THE BRIEF, MAGICAL TIME BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT by Jim Dodson
ILLUSTRATION BY GERRY O�NEILL
N
ot long ago as a beautiful summer evening settled around us, my wife and I were sitting with our friends, Joe and Liz, on the new deck facing our backyard shade garden, enjoying cool drinks and the season’s first sliced peaches. The fireflies had just come out. And birds were piping serene farewell notes to the long, hot day. “I love summer twilight,” Joe was moved to say. “Everything in nature pauses and takes a breath.” He went on to remember how, growing up in a big family of nine children, “my mother would shoo us all outdoors after supper to play in the twilight until it was dark. It was a magical time between day and night. A glimpse of heaven.” “We played Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light,” Liz remembered. “The fading light made it so much fun.” “And flashlight tag,” chimed Wendy, my wife, sipping her white wine and joining the memories. “We didn’t have to come in until the first stars appeared and my mother called us to come in for a bath and bed.” In a world that increasingly seems so different from the quieter, simpler one we grew up in, we all agreed, something about twilight seems about as timeless as moments get in this harried and overscheduled life we all live. In truth, our ancient ancestors held much the same view of the changing light that occurs when the sun sinks just below the horizon, or rises to it just before dawn, softly stage-lighting the world with a diffusion of light and dust, heralding either the prospect of rest or awakening. Like most rare things, the beauty seems to be in its brevity. Back when I was a small boy in a large world, summer twilight was especially meaningful to me. During my father’s newspaper career, we lived in a succession of small towns across the sleepy, deep South where we rarely stayed in one place long enough for me
to make friends or playmates. Because it was a time before mass air conditioning, I lived outdoors with adventure books and toy soldiers for companions, building forts and conducting Punic wars in the cool dirt I shared with our dog beneath the porch. The heat and brightness of midday made my eyes water and my head hurt. In the rural South Carolina town where I attended first grade, a formidable woman named Miss Jesse restored my mother, a former Maryland beauty queen, to health following a pair of late-term miscarriages, and taught her how to properly cook collards and grits. Come midday, while my mother rested, Miss Jesse would haul me out from under the porch and make me put on sandals to accompany her to the Piggly Wiggly or to run other errands around town in her baby blue Dodge Dart. Beneath a stunning dome of heat that lay over the town like a death ray from a Martian spaceship, it was Miss Jesse who explained to me that daytime was when the world did its business and, therefore, shoes and good manners were necessary in public. Removing my sandals to feel the cool tile floors of the Piggly Wiggly beneath my bare feet — the only air conditioned place in town save for the newspaper office — was a tactical error I made only once, as Miss Jesse had complete authority over my person. Yet it was also she who had me stand on her feet, dancing my skinny butt around the kitchen as she and my mother cooked supper to gospel music playing from the transistor radio propped in the kitchen window. Miss Jesse also informed me that both a good rain and twilight were two of the Almighty’s holiest moments, the former refreshing the earth, the latter replenishing the soul. I often heard her singing a gospel tune I’ve since spent many years unsuccessfully trying to find, a single line of which embedded itself in my brain: “In the shadows of the evening trees, my lord and savior stands and waits for me.” southparkmagazine.com | 61
