The small brown bats are out this evening and as we sit on our rooftop patio they offer up their carnivorous dance for all who choose to look skyward. Swallows have ceded the stage to their nocturnal counterparts but the dance is the same – small bodies, long wings, jigs and parries – creatures honouring the gift of the day and the onset of night.
Behind and below this dance, the lights of a ball diamond radiate blue-white, an intensity that seems to defy the onset of night and the natural order of the world. Behind this still, the smell from a chocolate factory drifts intermittently towards our vantage point. Sitting on wooden slatted folding chairs and drinking vodka tonics (no ice for you) we take in all these elements as contented, blessed spectators.
As a backdrop to this scene, the sun works a time-lapse alchemy with various types and strata of assembled clouds. July’s humidity adds to the cavalcade of shifting hues but as this processional plays out the sun, on this night, actually seems to be creating clouds, assembling them through light. Somewhere between the physical burning mass of our solar system’s star and the back of my retina, puffs and strands of cumulus luminousity appear through the act of observing and marveling.
As much as I crave it, hope for frozen time, there is no stasis here. The rotation of the earth is destroying these clouds (like a salad spinner tosses water from spinach) faster than the sun is creating them. The peach clouds have rapidly faded out, replaced by a sole grey-blue fair weather cumulus that, inconsolably, drags itself from the waxing spectacle of the night’s promise and dizzy hunting dance of the bats.
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