This house is designed to watch the sunset: nearly a solar calendar, today the sun was just a few degrees from its swing up the south hedgerow.  The summer solstice is nearly one quarter of the way up the north hedgerow.  Needless to say, I often try to watch the sunset.  It is, for me, a devotional exercise, a few minutes devoted to respectful admiration of the beauty of the world before me.  When I manage to take these few minutes, I feel that it is, an atavistic ‘backwards’ instinct I am sure, disrespectful to turn away before the sun has set, which of course leads to a mild fidget and then really observing where I am at that time. 

Today, I was in the dining room, and the sunset was a great swell of gold and then a perfect sun in the gap below grey clouds.  And I watched as the sun travelled through this gap.  The dining room has a large western window and a mirror exactly opposite, both are old glass.  Now, glass is one of the telltales when you look at an old building.  Modern windows, even those built in old patterns, have no waves and so they have correct reflections, but old glass creates distorted reflections.  The house has new storm windows, and when they are shut, as they are now, from the outside the house appears to have new windows: flat, harshly correct reflections.  But inside the light comes through the old glass, and so, as with the reflections, the light bends and twists, every wave in the glass creates a shadow or refraction.  The sun today had a double above it, and the light was banded on the walls, both east and west.  For but a minute what was Lancaster white trim became tiger’s eye gold before fading into twilight.  A gift of place and time.