The Golden Hour by Helen Chappell

There used to be a time between dinner and when the streetlights came on, when kids went outside to play. Summer evenings were long and full of light that lasted until nine. That light is considered so perfect that filmmakers refer to it as the Golden Hour, a time when the world is bathed in the perfect natural light of a low sun. It was a time when the world was settling down after a long, hot day. Drawn by the illusion of cool after a long, humid day, lawn mowers would roar all over the neighborhood, a sound of summer. Adults sat on porches and decks,

impossibly old and weighted down with adult problems, too tired to move, too hot. Go get me another iced tea. Get Daddy’s cigarettes (in those days, people smoked). If you wanted to throw a ball or climb a tree or prog around on the river shore, they would protest that they were just too exhausted, that it was too hot to move, and they just wanted to sit there, go away so they could talk about boring old adult stuff. So you went away and hung out with the neighborhood kids. Somehow, someone had the wise idea that they were a superhero and, armed with a cape, could jump off

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