Thursday, September 08, 2005

The Season is Changing

It isn't officially Fall but I'm noticing a difference in the weather here in San Miguel de Allende. I've started wearing my denim shirt a little longer in the mornings and yesterday I put it on in the late afternoon. First time I have worn it in the afternoon since we came in March. That doesn't mean that the middle of the day isn't warm. It is but the cool hours are getting longer and cooler. I wish I could tell you the temperature but somewhere in our comings and goings we have misplaced the outdoor thermometer.

The daylight hours are also shifting. When I wake up in the morning the sky is still in that inbetween time of daylight and dark and that time seems to linger longer....an excuse for me to linger longer in bed too.

I was trying to find a word for this time of the morning but the word that kept coming to mind was "twilight" which of course is about the evening. The on-line dictionary defines twilight as "the time from when the sun begins to set to the onset of total darkness." When I think of the morning, "dawn" comes to mind but that doesn't have the same connotation in my mind and so I looked it up in the dictionary too. "Dawn: the first appearance of light in the morning." The first appearance of light isn't the same as "twilight" which is about a period of transition.

Can someone think of a word that better describes the time when the sky begins to lighten to when the sun actually rises?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like the word "gloaming", just because it sounds so poetic to me; but it also refers to twilight. Good luck in your word search. Webshots has hurricane photos here:
http://www.webshots.com/collections/hurricane/hurricane_0.html if you are interested.

Anonymous said...

How about rising-sun's aura. Not particulary poetic ;-0
Calypso John

Anonymous said...

OK here is a more poetic version for Brenda:
Morning's emerging illumination. More than one word I know - I will stop now ;-)

Calypso John

Anonymous said...

Billie,

I like 'daybreak', 'dawning' and 'first light'...and there's 'sunrise' of course...

Steve

Anonymous said...

My dictionary says that twilight can be in the morning or in the evening. The time between first light and sunrise in the morning is defined as twilight. The time between sunset and dark is also twilight. Maybe they could be distinguished as "twilight of the dawn" or "twilight of the dusk".

BillO