January 14, 2020 Winter Sunset Musings

As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens. I didn’t make that up, but I’ll bet it was a fellow Minnesota who coined it. These are the days that send many of our people scurrying to Florida or Arizona as fast as they can, not to return until March or April. Not that we’ve had the below-zero, skin-freezing temperatures yet – it’s been fairly mild, as winters go. All this snow and ice and wind scrubs us clean and scares away the kind of insects and snakes that are the sinister underbelly of the warm South.

I, ,too, went south today. We’re one of the last houses you pass as you leave our town heading south. In fact, as soon as you pass us, the street becomes a county road and there are wide, flat fields where e’er you look. I could tell that the sun would be setting soon and wanted to be free of the usual impediments to seeing it – all those bare-nekkid trees and bushes, all the clusters of houses. But as soon as I left them behind, I also left behind their shelter from the wind. The romance of getting a sunset photo got a severe slap in the face.

Winter Sunset Haiku
Red, yellow, orange
Warm colors, cold, distant sun.
My fingers are blue.

Cars and trucks whizzed by me and added to the ambiance, with their sounds increasing and then decreasing as they went by. It was a good sound track for my walk. I took a bunch of photos, but in the end, the one I loved the most was the one I took on our driveway when I was almost home. I passed a leaf standing proudly in the snow with the setting sun in the background and in a moment of dedication to the art that surprised me, I laid down on my stomach in the snow to get the photo.

Soli Deo gloria.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning…