Draw the shade

Before my face was kissed by the cold, fresh air, I could see through the tall cafeteria windows that a sunset was happening. It wasn’t a “10” on the awe scale, just some pleasant refraction sketching an outline around low, puffy clouds of gray-blue. Many of us are fortunate to see so many sunsets in our lives that few stick in our memories, and most of the time we remember more about the place and who we were with than the exact colors and style of nature’s curtain call.

It’s only been 12 hours or so and the hues exact position in the Crayola 133 is fading. A quick lookup suggests last night’s horizon wasn’t colored with any of the “standard 12.” Yeah, sure, they were palette mixed from the 3 primary shades, but from rapidly dimming recall, I’m guessing it was Atomic Tangerine or Bittersweet. Yeah, that’s the one.

My childhood memories evoke the long, bright days of endless summer. I’m sure some of the shortening days of increasing cold and darkness are buried in there, but the days I hold onto were warm and filled with light. As I looked at the glow seeping out of the sky last night, I wondered how many more I’d see, where I’d see them and with who. It wasn’t a bleak, morbid assessment. On the way home I chatted with my dad. He’s 77, in decent health and with fully functioning cognition. I told him how lucky he was. I realized the same about myself. At this point in life, it still seems about two minutes brighter every day.