Sundowners
May 15, 2008 by reluctantmemsahibIs there better soul food than the slow slide of dusk to nightfall? Is there anything to match it for feel-good factor?
Not where I live.
When we arrive at the dam, the big dam (the Outpost is flanked by two, one smaller than the other though both swollen happy and fat from recent good rains) the sun is still quite high and drums the earth so that sand is warm beneath our feet. Hat rides her bike and the dogs tear about in an ecstasy of new smells and mud and water. We are all tall; the sun is no longer sitting on noon and we short and stout, instead it’s put us in a rack and stretched us so that we are pin thin and gangly, as if it’s trying to pull us over the horizon with it.
It’s quiet. And it’s not. The dogs splash and bark at everything and nothing. The air is punctured by bird calls. But the absence of car horns and voices and the melancholy hoot of trains mean I only hear silence. Glorious, settling, silence.
As the sun sinks, dragging the heat and shadows with it, a few torn fragments of cloud gather about it as if in conference: ‘you gonna be around tomorrow or should we come out?’. The answer in the Outpost, at this time of the year anyway, is always, ‘Nope; I’ll be here’. The clouds blush then, a faint tell-tale pink, a little embarrassed that they’d have dared presume otherwise.
Night comes bustling in quickly here. Shooing away the sun when it thinks it’s had its day, hurrying it suddenly, urging it to take its heat and light – which as it collapses into distant hills, is filtered through trees – with it.
Low enough now to admire its reflection in the water’s surface which it forges bling-blindingly gold, the sun is making the most of final moments of glory. A showoff.

It’s cool suddenly. My beer is empty and I need a jumper. Hat clambers from the roof top from where she’s been watching the antics of the dogs and telling me about the book she is reading, Frances Hobson Burnett’s Secret Garden. It is inscribed with my grandmother’s name and the price, she remarks, was just two shillings. “Was that a lot of money then, Mum?”








