Shadows of the Evening

Maybe it’s because I’ve been immersed in the sweetly sentimental world of the latest Ken Burns (my hero!) film, on Country Music, these last few days. Maybe it’s the earlier sunsets, the surest sign we in the Northern Hemisphere have of the approaching winter. Mostly, it is because of what the autumnal equinox means to me this year. It marks the first full year since Timothy’s passing on September 22, 2018, deep in the shadows of third night of the equinoctial full moon.

But anyway, I’ve heard this old song playing in my mind’s ears these last days, and can’t forget it. As they say to do with “earworms,” I’ve just had to sing it through, soft as a lullaby to the cats, in hopes it will put the song to rest, like the lullaby it is. And bring some heart’s ease to me, too.

Now the Day is Over

Now the wind is whispering
In stillness soft and sweet
All of nature’s creatures
Now are sound asleep

The birds and beasts and flowers
All have gone to sleep

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I learned it when I was six or seven years old, standing in the Sunday evening dusk at the end of a boat dock in the Adirondack Mountains. The harmonies were handed down from one year of girls, in pressed white shorts, white polos, and dark green sweaters blazoned with an E for Echo Camp on the heart-side, to the next. The head of the camp, Mrs. Clough, would stand beside the flagpole as three girls from one of the senior cabins — perhaps the Tamaracks or the Firs — would solemnly pace the length of the dock to take down the flag and fold it properly for the night.

We little Silver Maples would be hushed by our counselor, Miss Susan, and told to wait quietly until the trio passed by us. Ignoring our fidgeting, they carried the flag to a small cupboard on shore, where it would wait until the next morning’s sun crept over Racquette Lake.

I’ve been thinking of this song, and all the old hymns and folk songs, the Woody Guthrie rabble-rousers and the Isley Brothers’ love songs, the City of New Orleans and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot… the songs we sang, me and Timothy’s friends and family, almost one year ago tonight, to carry my love over the last great divide of this life to the next.

I can only hope that, someday, someone will think to sing them for me.

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I can’t find a sung version like the lyrics I remember singing on the dock at sunset. Even the melody seems strangely off-kilter in many of the hymnal versions online. But this one, by the Hastings College Choir, is closest to the right tune. And the baritone soloist reminds me a bit of the nurse on the Critical Care floor at Virginia Mason Seattle, who came back after his shift to teach us a song he’d sung in his college choir, so we could all sing it to Tim.