Short twilights, return home

Editor's note: This column originally was published Nov. 26, 2000.

Twilights come early now, and they don't linger like they did a few weeks ago. They are short and sweet and full of a different color. By four o'clock in the afternoon one can see, if it is a clear day, that the nearer the sun gets to the horizon the faster it seems to travel.

If I'm somewhere away from home during this short twilight time and see that my watch says it is nearing four o'clock I begin to gather in myself and start for home. Part of this urgency to get home, no doubt, harks back to my early school days when school wasn't dismissed until four o'clock and there was a long way to walk home. Part of the way the sun was directly in our eyes, for we weren't very tall then, but when my sister and I climbed over the last hill, traversed the last field, crossed the last creek, we could look up the side of still another hill and see home. The purple shadows had closed in on us and we could see that lamps had already been lit and detect, in the fast coming darkness, blue woodsmoke ascending from the kitchen chimney which spoke of warmth and good things to eat and loved ones anxiously awaiting our arrival.

If you are a connoisseur of sunsets and twilight times, you will notice that the sky above the horizon now has a faint green color. If there are clouds around they are dark purple and dark blue and soon disappear into the darkness of night. This green color is new, as if to denote a cooling-off time. It is like a subdued overture to a coming, gorgeous display of winter sunsets that thrill us with the whole spectrum of colors, glimmering, waving, dancing, sending rippled ribbons of color into the sky along the western horizon. I am not an atmospheric-plus-temperature, plus-dust-particles, plus-slanting-sunlight expert; the conclusions are only philosophical and imaginative.

Twilight time is coming-home time. I watch the circle of home lights come on around me and worry a little bit if I see one home that is still dark far after darkness has descended. The cars that pass by my house seem to go a little faster at day's end as if the driver is anxious to get home. We once had a horse that always broke into a fast trot when he came within the smell of his home, the big barn.

All of this reminds me of the time, during an early Thanksgiving dinner, when during all the small talk around the table -- inquiries about whether the chicken-house door had been closed, how many eggs had been gathered that day, if the cream separator had been thoroughly washed and dried -- my sister, Lillian, as if she hadn't been listening to any of it, raised her hand for silence and said, "I wish everybody had a home." This got quiet attention from the rest of us as we tried to sort out what she meant. A home like ours? A place out of the cold? A place where others shared the exigencies of life?

A log in the kitchen fireplace fell in two, sending up a shower of sparks as if to punctuate Lillian's statement. Tabby Cat, curled up in a rocking chair, arose, stretched, then lay back down, resuming her loud purring. Eventually Grandpa, the senior of the household, said a loud and heartily, "Amen." To which we all vocally responded, in quieter but just as fervent tones.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.