It all depends on your perspective . . .  Yesterday I happened to look up through the branches of our crab apple and silver maple trees and saw that the leaves way, way up there were suffused with late-afternoon sunlight.

When I’m driving through the countryside north of town, I’m always surprised by how brightly illuminated everything is by the slanted rays of late-afternoon sun.  My own neighborhood has so many trees and city blocks densely packed with houses that everything falls into shadow as the sun slips lower in the sky toward sunset.

Yet the treetops are still brightly lit long after evening arrives at ground level.  You can see it in the photo below, too.  The line of trees along the bottom of the photograph and the top branches of the tree on the right are much brighter than that tree’s shaded lower branches.

One  of my favorite poems is “Casey at the Bat,” a line near the end of which is the title of today’s blog post.  It doesn’t matter how wonderful things may be elsewhere in the world; there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that our immediate reality is just a “microclimate.”