Golden Hours

Those golden hours come ever sooner each day. I used to have time to eat a slow dinner and then slip on sandals and saunter down to the water to catch a sunset. Now the dinner is hurried through or even interrupted and the saunter becomes a careful old lady quick trot with camera clutched to my side.  I feel the cold dusting of raindrops as I bump the salt bush while my attention is on the soft muddy sand or sharp gravel.

Sometimes I get there early enough to see the mallards sorting their spaces for the night and pausing for food at the edge of the grasses.  There is one little one that was slow to hatch this summer and is behind in growing before winter.  The others seem to be paying special attention to it.  Other times my trot is too quick and noisy and interrupts deer in the nearby woods and startles the lazy squirrel from his tummy stuffing repast of fallen acorns and forces the mallards to hide from my camera on the far side of the river.

But the eventual "Goodbye" slows me down and makes me breathe deeper and I forget any food that was left to cool on the dinner plate.