THAT TIME OF DAY

Sunsets are valued as beauty in nature at its best, and highly desirable even though they indicate the movement of time through another 24 hours we will never again see.

The best sunsets require clouds. Clouds change their shape and basic nature in less time than it takes to run throughout the house closing windows. Clouds are seen to hide the sun in the sky overhead, and in metaphors holding truth in a small, vowel congested word. Every cloud has a silver lining. Her head is in the clouds. There are dark clouds on the horizon.

In 1802 William Wordsworth invoked a lonely cloud to represent his solitude, writing, "I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host of golden daffodils;/Beside the lake./ Beneath the trees,/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

Float clouds, cumulous or cirrus, above the western horizon as the earth turns your small plot of land away from the sun and you have potential for a breathtaking sunset. Growing up on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan my father would scan the early evening sky and announce, “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. Red in the night, sailors delight.” And another day passes into our memory.