Darker at six

"Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace—in peace because they trust in you." — Isaiah 26:3

I noticed this morning that the house is darker at six than it was a month ago.

Not by much. A few minutes, maybe. But I came downstairs and the kitchen was not the same kitchen it was in July at six o'clock, when the light was already filling the room and the morning felt like it had been going on for a while before I arrived. This morning the kitchen was still in the last minutes of dark and I turned on the light over the stove and made the coffee and waited.

It is a small thing. Sunrise moves and the house moves with it and by September the kitchen will be fully dark at six and I will not remember what it felt like to come downstairs into light. But right now, in the middle of August, the change is noticeable. The house is telling me something about the year.

The newspaper had a back-to-school ad this morning. Office supplies and backpacks and shoes. I thought about Emma and Jack and Olivia and what their summers have looked like and how a summer looks different to a child than it does to a grandmother. To a child, August is the last of something. To me it is the long middle of something. The children feel the ending. I feel the settling.

The back porch was cooler this evening than it has been. Not cold. Not fall. But the air had a quality to it that was not July air. Biscuit lay at my feet and I sat in the chair and I could hear the crickets and they sounded the same as they have sounded every August evening for as long as I have been sitting on this porch, and that sameness was a comfort.

I sat there until the light was gone and the first stars were out and the house behind me was dark except for the lamp in the living room that I leave on because I like coming inside to a lit room. The evening was quiet. The kind of quiet that is not empty but full of things that do not need to be named.

Lord, keep me in your peace.