Times of year and times of day have characters all their own, colors all their own, slants of shadows and shifting lights that are not shared, but are coveted jealously. There is the gold of autumn, the blue of winter, the joy and bloom of spring.There is the sweetness of the lazy days at the end of summer, the snap and crackle richness of autumn.

In the dusky winter evening, the already-pale colors became muted and harder to name, as the delicate light of winter gave way to night. Up and over hills, down and into gullies, in and out of the sinking sunlight. Shadows slanted between the trees and on the pine-needed-carpeted slopes, and clumps of rabbit brush seemed to glow, with the sun shining from behind them.

The grey of a snowless winter day took on a golden tint, and all was gold and grey and brown. Here and there flickered glints of green – A lichen nestled in the carpet of pine needles, a tiny star of silver-green leaves growing from a cleft in a rock, a patch of yucca, still green as springtime, and the darker green of the living pines.

At last, the sun sank away and the gold and gleam faded to twilight, then to night. Twilight and dawn, noon and night, summer and winter, spring and fall, heat and cold, cloudy and clear – What a palette, and what a Creator God!