This is the first time I’ve ever crossposted between the LiveJournal I keep and monoblogue. But this is something I wanted to share.
This is one of those nights I’m skipping the gory details of life and focusing on a 20 minute walk.
Tonight we had one of the most gorgeous sunsets I’ve seen in a long time. It rained a good chunk of the day but now it’s cleared off. It so happened that a bank of high clouds was laying almost perfectly perpendicular to the sun angle. The best analogy I could think of as I walked and enjoyed the view was this:
Imagine if you will a barbeque grill full of charcoal that’s a fairly uniform gray and ashy. But between the coals there’s a lot of hotter spots glowing. The sunset tonight on those clouds reminded me of this – fiery orange at first, then fading through the spectrum of reds and slowly disappearing. What was projected on a whole large bank of clouds at first slowly receded in both brightness and area, finally becoming a dark reddish-gray smudge as the sun receded over the unseen horizon.
Then the sky itself took center stage, a million shades of yellow fading to orange then to purple as it met the remnants of the cloudbank as it moved southeastward. It backlit the trees and buildings in the medium distance. Where I walk is basically a quarter mile of so of open area sandwiched between my apartment complex on the east and an established neighborhood on the west.
At some point, I’m going to move on from this apartment I live in now, I’m already getting the itch to be back in a place I can call my own. I’m pretty settled on the Eastern Shore now. I’m sure there were a hundred sunsets like this when I was growing up in a rural area of northwest Ohio that had an almost clear view to the west, with the exception of the corn growing in the field. But tonight I wanted to reflect on this sunset that I didn’t miss and wanted to remember. It was an odd circumstance that I was out this late doing my walk, and maybe I needed a reminder that life’s not half bad if you take a little time and live in the world. Had I been in front of the TV or the computer I would’ve missed it. Hopefully you didn’t, but make sure you catch the next repeat performance if you did.
