Winter Twilights

Winter has the best twilights and sunsets.  They are the best thing about living out here on the plains.  Everyone loves the clouds, and I do too, but my favorite is a cloudless day when the rim of the sky turns golden after the sun sets.  You see the scattered lights come on around you, a tree or a house here and there black against the deep yellow glow in the gathering darkness.

I picked up my daughter from school for the holidays.  We were driving south for the whole sunset and twilight.  It was vivid, then we rolled down the window and were stunned into silence.  It was cold, but we kept rolling down the window for another glimpse.  It is remarkable how much even just a slightly tinted window put an unwelcome barrier between us and our world.  Then we tried to take a picture.  Fat chance.  I have never seen a photograph or a painting  that did justice to a sunset.  Even the best of them are only reflecting light.  Whereas the sunset in the world is light itself.

For a contest, I wrote a short story once about an artist who had invented a light-producing series of pigments so he could paint sunsets.  He was being sued by someone who had damaged his eyes staring at it.  The editor wrote me a note that he really liked my story but they had another story that was also about the impact of art and it was shorter, so he couldn’t justify adding mine to the anthology.  My response was I deserved to have my story rejected.  It wasn’t about the impact of art at all.  It was about how durn cool it would be to have light producing pigments.  If my story sounded like it was about the impact of art I had failed pretty badly.

When we got  home, my daughter eventually found her way to the piano.  It was like old times listening to her play.  Sure, we have a fair amount of music in our home to listen to.  Speakers and playlists, we got ’em.  But I had forgotten how much more real and more  moving live music was.

There’s less live music every year, but it still means something that no perfect recording can match.

You might say the same about the written word.  We few friends here are some of the last connoisseurs of the word in the age of the algorithm.

This Christmas will probably not be the best Christmas I have ever had.  Some of my kids are grown.  My glory days of Christmas are probably behind me.  But those Christmases can only be seen through the tinted glass of memory.  This Christmas is real and now, glowing with light on the horizon.