Twilight

Its that time of day when the sun has descended below the horizon, but the sky is still reflecting light; the transitional period of day, sung about in the first stanza of the children's poem/prayer/song by Sabine Baring-Gould:

"Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh, Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky."  I have just finished reading my quota of students' research papers for the day; my brain is fried. Its time to consider what I will have for dinner but I can't think straight.  Little whimpers dribble from my lips. FuBu jumps in my lap, ever ready for some petting. Now that is something I can do: its automatic, takes very little thought, while it provides a quick payoff. Our breathe slows down into deep inhales,  slow exhales. FuBu begins to purr, and I can feel my head, neck, and shoulder muscles begin to relax. The breeze from the afternoon has turned into twilight wind. The leaves on the eucalyptus trees are  rapidly twisting, or perhaps they're doing the boogaloo! But you should hear the trees. They creak.  Yes. They sound like the loose floor board in Grandma's attic. And they moan just like that missing "uncle" your childhood active imagination believed lived locked in a secret closet  on Granny's top floor. Its going to rain, I can smell the ocean, and the seagulls are circling and squawking overhead.  FuBu and I are happy to be in the house, safe and warm.  As I listen to her contented purr,  I am reminded of the twilight time of my childhood. It was the time of day I felt most unsafe,  unprotected. You might say I lived in a constant state of fear. My family lived in a too tight apartment over my father's funeral home. In the basement was my mother's laundry room, where the household freezer resided, my father's workshop, where he made  cabinetry in his spare time,  the embalming room where he made his living,  preparing the dearly departed for their final stage of departure, and our playroom, right next to the room  where my Dad drained blood from corpses and replaced it with embalming fluid.  My little sisters and I dreaded twilight. As the sun began to go down, and my mother began to prepare the evening's meal, she would ask one of us politely to go downstairs to the freezer and retrieve packages  of frozen vegetables. I can hear the sing-songy voice, even now: "YaYa, would you like to go downstairs and  get some spinach for dinner?" "No, Ma, I wouldn't." (Thought it, never said it.) So, I would begrudgingly walk down the front stairs,  into my Dad's office, where I would pause, sit on the couch and talk to myself. "There is nothing to fear,  you can do this." I would take a big breath, hold it, and run past the dead person laying "in rest" in a casket  in the very next room, open the door to the basement, race down the stairs, past the embalming room,  where I could hear the pump extracting bodily fluids, race to the freezer, grab the first four packages of frozen vegetables I could put my hands on, hope they were all the same vegetables, and retrace my steps  back up the stairs.  There I would pause again, take another deep breath, pray that I could sneak safely past the dead person,  most often someone I knew, and race back up the stairs to the kitchen. If I mistakingly picked up  two packages of frozen spinach and two packages of frozen string beans, I would have to  descend those stairs again and rectify the problem.  Yes, twilight is an eery time of day for me, even now. So when I feel very anxious about it,  I hum this children's hynm.