Consolations of Twilight

Left work at 5:00pm - the first time I've done so for a number of weeks now. The first time this year it has not been completely pitch black when I leave work either.
It is a cliche to say that twilight is a favourite time of day - I would reserve much mistrust for an individual who is not, in some way, in love with the blue hour of dusk - but what is it about this numinous hour that is so alluring?
Perhaps it is the colour of the sky - tonight's sky was a brilliant blue - the colour of sea shallows, or perhaps spring in some remote polar county. Perhaps not. Sometimes the sky at twilight is obscured by clouds, and the night seems to seep up from pools hidden beneath the road.
Perhaps it is the thought of the quietening landscape that is so intriguing, those hidden corners of the city lost to night, and out beyond the lamp lit suburbs, the darkening fields slipping into nightfall. As the light fades, those fields and coppices and silent streams, spinneys, pools and embankment-heavy lanes become some other thing, an unmapped geography, a country of shadows and possibility. We might never see this land, but we know, as we walk back through the kind consolations of twilight, that in the night, when we wake from sleep, it waits for us, perhaps only a few well known streets or roads away, the last wilderness, a night-made unknown.