This is my favorite time of year. The old timers here know this. Maybe it’s because I don’t shut up about it.  Well, this morning is no different. So why is this my favorite time of year?

The evenings are filled with magic. The heat of the day has been crushed by whatever rain happened to fall on my neighborhood. Like yesterday, I laid down for a nap at the hottest part of the day I was rudely interrupted by a downpour that seemed to be centered solely on my side of town. So at 3 pm the temperature plummeted from a high of 103 down to a lovely 78. That was all the motivation I needed to get up and head to the store. All of a sudden the idea of cooking fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy sounded appealing.

The evening is when Mousebreath gets up from her 12 hour nap and gets the zoomies. I leave the front door open with a floor fan blowing the sweet scented air into the house. Mouse manages most of the time to not run head long into the base as she bolts in and out chasing whatever her mind conjures. However, all attempts to catch her in action have been futile. It harder to get a photo of a grey cat running at night than I thought. So I have two types of night photos. One, where she is up on her favorite perch looking out the front door for her next victim,

and one where she takes a much needed snooze between races.

If we are lucky, the evening provides a thunderstorm that walks on lightning and gives us a fun light show. The other year I shot a 1:11 video and counted 74 lightning strikes. I lost that footage as the phone croaked. But the view from my front yard can still offer up this.

Evening is when the energy comes back to many things. As I water my garden so the water doesn’t evaporate immediately in the sunlight, bats flit around my head chasing down every last bug so they don’t fly into my house and annoy me all night. Mighty neighborly of them. Skunks stretch their legs and get ready to party it up all night long in the trash cans. Families hit the streets to walk around with strollers and laughing kids jump in the puddles.

The bourbon has finally done it’s job and for the first time all day I can stop thinking about what needs to be done and I can fall asleep in the breeze of the fan and wake up in the night to putter around on whatever project has captured my fancy, unencumbered by heat or distraction.