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ofthe sun save a white line on the horizon—no red streaks in the sky, no long golden fingers coming across the sea in your direction—the sunset round is over.

    For dinner we sometimes go down the hill and down the road to one of the restaurants. Sometimes we cook at the cottage.
    Either way, these are dinners where you take your time between courses and you linger over coffee. For when dinner is over, unless you have to drive back to the cottage or wash the dishes, there is not much to do. It is glorious. No telephone, no television, no early appointments to get ready for. Not much more than cards and quiet talk, books and gentle laughter, and the stars and the moon. You can even go to bed at sundown if you like; there is nothing to keep you from it.
    The surf crashes below on the rocks, the breeze comes through the windows, and the ceiling fan creaks. There is the occasional cheerful honk of a car horn onthe road below, and sometimes the laughter and the music will filter up the hill from the hotel restaurant down at the beach. The tree frogs sing their peaceful two-note lullaby, the evening hymn of St. Cecilia. And then sweet sleep comes.

    When the time comes for you to buy a beach, I recommend you pick one facing directly north or directly south so that the sunrise and the sunset are on your right or your left as you look up and down the beach. Then in the morning you can get up to watch the day begin and to scribble and to have your coffee—all of which you will be required to do if you have been blessed enough to buy a beach. You can watch the day end as well while the breeze freshens and the fishing boats hurry home and the last rays of the sun warm your skin. And you can watch the seabirds as they slowly fly their way along the shoreline toward the sun.
    They are fishing. I do not know the science that goeswith this—whether they are drawn to the light or the warmth, or if the breezes are more helpful for them to cruise along slowly in the air when the sun is close to the horizon, or if the angle of the sunlight enables them to better see the shape of a snack that is swimming below. I only know that when you are up at first light and you watch the sun as it rises, you will see them flying along the shoreline, heading toward the sun.
    And I know that in the evening you will see them headed the other way. Slowly, languidly, occasionally dropping straight down out of the sky from as much as a hundred feet, face first into the water. It looks as though someone has thrown them from a cliff.
    And sometimes in the evening, if you can bear to take your eyes off the sunset itself, you will see them circle higher and higher, drifting on the currents of the wind in great circles that spiral upward toward the clouds and toward the sun itself.
    We watched one put on a show for us one afternoon at the sunset hour on St. Cecilia. He started out circling the water along the bottom of the cliff, a fewfeet above the waters of the straits. And then he began making circles and going higher and higher.
    He kept arcing his way back so he was almost over us on each turn. I think he knew he had an audience. After a few minutes we had to break out our binoculars and lie flat on our backs and stare straight up to see him. As the sun disappeared, he did as well, far above us; we lost him in a cloud or the shadow of one. He was circling toward the sun when we saw him last.
    So am I these days.

    One way or another I have spent most of my life watching for certain signs and wonders of the Something Unnamed that is at the center of everything.
    Over the years I have come to see that some sitting still is required if one is to see such things. I think that is why I am drawn to the still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow. And it is why I wait at the railing to watch the sun slip away.
    I have also come to believe that it helps to keep circling as well, which is as good a name for my scribbling as anything else I can think of. So I do,