Day 24 (Round IV) "In the trenches": crystalline blue edition

Crystalline blue evening up here on the South Plains: one of those nights we'll get in the fall when, as the daytime heat holds but the overnight lows begin to differ, the daylight gets shorter but the
twilight longer. When that long, slow twilight brings cooling temperatures, the cloudless sky is a crystalline blue, shading to cobalt overhead and azure in the darkening west.

On nights like this, the West Texans have discovered that it can be pleasant, in the cool stillness of the evening, to sit outside, drink some beer or good coffee, and listen to some low-impact music. They've been doing it in places like Austin for decades--both my deario Molly Ivins, rest her soul, and her mentor Willie Morris, in his memoir of LBJ and Austin in the Fifties, have written great scenes set in the Austin beer "gartens"--but it ain't so bad up here neither.

So, sitting outside the local indie coffeeshop in the cool of the evening, waiting for Coop and The General to arrive from the early-evening country jam in the auto-finishing shop, before we slam out our own personalized take on the Irish tradition, seems like a not-too-bad place to be: in a week, or in a lifetime.

Not too bad at all.