The Art of Dusk

Tripping Out on Nature

Clever Cultural Blendings

Color and Character

When the sun, a deep yellow color of gold, had abdicated its sovereign power of the day by slipping behind a hump in the northeast sector of the mountain range, the lower sky’s plumage took note and stirred a mosaic of slate-gray, smoky gray, mauve, taupe and a thin slice of plum across the northern quadrant.

What a showoff she was, this all-day patch of blue that swathed the upper atmosphere in the stifling heat. That shimmied like a soul dancer doing the tic-tac-toe across the waves, which heaved and weaved without let up as they mamaguy-ed the surface of the Caribbean Sea. The sea tripping now, then pushing the waves forward and pulling them back all afternoon long.

Leave it to the thirty or so bathers to bring a measure of human drama as they dove above the crests, and, as if in submission, ducked under them, only to come up for air, time and again. For some, to expectorate, cleanse the nostrils, to mix, in a sense, ice cream with the local pepper sauce.

Ha! That would do it.

That’s not what brought us here, though. We sat on slabs of bluish stone in the shade of a small tree, awaiting the gradual departure of the dahlia, its creamy luster fading to the color of dead flowers.