Summer evening walk

I took a walk by myself tonight. It was about 8:00. The sun was setting. By the time I arrived back my house, it was dark. Not perfectly dark but headlights were needed.
It was 77F. Perfect.
I had no music in my ears, no podcasts. Other folks were out walking. Kids were being gathered up at the playground and shooed home by parents who were contemplating how to avoid a long drawn-out bedtime.
I realized that I didn’t grow up here. I knew that of course but there is little to remind me of that fact day to day. But this evening everything entered my senses like it was new. It didn’t spark any recollections of my childhood until I forced myself to think of it.
Back east, we had idyllic nights too. More humid with a kind of hum in the air that is absent from the Northwest. Night here is a gentle void that sweeps over you. Back home it was more like an opening of restaurant for dinner. Prep is done and the stations are stocked. Everyone is ready and the customers start to come in.
You notice the mosquitos. Once you spray on the repellant then you notice the frogs. Eventually the fireflies lit-up the night, at the margins of the grass, where the swamp meets the field or the woods, by the shores of the river or any small pond. It’s a kind of nervous energy in contrast.
This is what is deep in my consciousness. It is is not replaceable. Even now, as I walk through my new reality, my reality for the past 20 years, I find it slightly foreign. Dusk arrives as it must, everyday. And today,it was beautiful in its way. I could have walked and walked and walked.
Here I was, thoroughly present in this experience. I wasn’t pining for anything. I wasn’t wistful.
There was briefly a faint sub-sonic echo. I wondered what is going through everyone’s mind. My mind was whispering, “did you hear that?” but to whom? Turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary. I am still soaking it in.