Flaming Amazement

Ah, these burnished summer days! In the eastern Ontario highlands, the rolling fields are studded with great round bales of hay. Shadows stretch long skinny fingers across cropped acreages at dusk, and deer and wild turkeys feed under the trees.

The evening sun flames amazement as it drops below the horizon. I've always loved the words "I flamed amazement", spoken by Ariel in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, (Act I, Scene 2). They seem just right for a balmy summer evening when the setting sun is putting on a blazing show, and there is magic in the air.

Shadows slanting across the landscape lengthen, grow sharper and deeper as days grow shorter. As if to compensate for waning daylight hours, northern sunsets light up the horizon in gold, inky blue and purple, perfect molten light and technicolor clouds. 

Beau and I lean against a fence at sunset, and my camera and lens can scarcely take in all the riches on offer. The setting sun dazzles our eyes, and the moon is as lustrous as a great cosmic pearl; she seems lit from within. I know the moon has no light of her own and borrows it from the sun, but it always seems otherwise at this time of the year. The fabulous sundown light is enough to make one swoon in delight.