A nightly ramble

More often than not, Idriss and I take a walk after dinner. It's almost always dark by then, but that's OK. We have a ritual walk, too. We head down into the village and to the waterfront park, where we loop around the flagstone pathway, and turn towards home. Perhaps with a few lingering moments on the bench, to take in the smell of the sea and the fresh night air. 

It's the nightly walk, it's our nightly walk, and it's different from the daytime walk (down the hill, along the waterfront, and back up through the south side of Sea Cliff).

Tonight we were tired and started late, and so we took a shorter route, to the large, flat, square village park not too far from home. It's big enough to have a couple of little league baseball diamonds, with plenty of open space in between. 

But it's planted all along the borders with old, tall trees - so if you don't see the baseball diamonds, it feels more like you're on someone's extensive and gracious grounds. 

Even better, it's so thoroughly, incredibly dark for a suburb; it has no lighting at all. 

So tonight we went and stood in the middle of the field, to take in the darkness and the moon and the sky. And what a sky: a deep peacock to the west, with a bright indigo fading to navy over our heads. The stars were out, and the puffy clouds were highly visible, perhaps because the moon was very bright. 

And from the middle of the dark field, looking up, with the voluptuous lines of the clouds and the jagged half moon and the bright twinkling stars overhead, it felt like we could see to the ends of the universe, and it was curved over our heads in an infinite loop.