Stretching back to my childhood, dusk is my least favorite time of day. It has the light photographers and filmmakers like best: the magic hour, or golden hour, they call it. In my novels, even though he is a movie director, my character shares my moodiness at this time of day. I know my reasons; I’m not sure I know his yet.
When we went to New York in October of 2001, it wasn’t planned that we’d be in Lower Manhattan at dusk. The timing just turned out that way. It was eerily quiet and painful. I’ve probably shared pictures on here from that day; the photo above is not from those or that place or this date. I used it only because it evokes that sad dusk mood as I mourn those lost, all that we lost, on September 11, 2001.
I’ve been thinking a lot about sadness lately for different reasons, and so I’ve been looking back to this day twenty years ago and the time afterward. I feel like if I try a little harder, give my memory a little more power, something I learned then will help me get through now.
In 2013, I posted a poem on this date and decided to use it again. Maybe it will mean something to you, too, as you face your own challenges and questions and uncertainties.
Dreams in the dusk,
Only dreams closing the day
And with the day’s close going back
To the gray things, the dark things,
The far, deep things of dreamland.
Dreams, only dreams in the dusk,
Only the old remembered pictures
Of lost days when the day’s loss
Wrote in tears the heart’s loss.
Tears and loss and broken dreams
May find your heart at dusk.
“Dreams in the Dusk,” Carl Sandburg
I think I understand the general feeling about dusk. Conversely, my favourite time of day is dawn. The freshest, purest time of the day (especially in summer). So much promise. I feel the same way about the spring.
Oh, my gosh, dawn in the summer. When I was a girl, I loved to be the first to wake up and go outside and watch the world come to life. There was one place we lived that was so wild and beautiful. I can still remember those mornings alone. I was maybe eleven/twelve in that house.