As I hammered away at the keyboard the setting sun splashed me in the face. I turned to look and POW the whole sky caught fire. I grabbed the camera, flew out the door and down a whole lot of stairs, trotted across the road and trespassed through the neighbors’ yard to get there before the spectacle faded.
Thrum, thrum. Streamers of candy-colored light rode the wind. Dark waves crashed on the beach and threw back shards of color. Bare trees vibrated. I took as many pictures as I could before frostbite set in.
I cannot help it. I love extravagant, tacky sunsets. The ones that look like cheap paper fans unfurling into rainbows. The ones that look like ridiculous layered drinks, one gaudy liqueur layered over another, guaranteed to give you a bad headache. The ones featured on the revolving lamp bases of my youth, deer racing through forest fires, eagles flying across orange and purple skies.
It comes of growing up in a northern tourist town where the Gift Shops were full of cedar boxes and china bears and carved Hodags, where an art gallery was something that you might meet sometime in the distant future if you ever went away to a Big City like Milwaukee. Ah well. I went away to big cities and learned a lot of very interesting things. But I never lost my taste for good beer, a juicy burger, and a big, brassy, rosefire and flaming amethyst sunset.
Even the dying coals were over the top.
Over on the Leelanau at the Jolli Lodge, Greg Jolliffe was looking at the sunset, too. As he is a much better photographer, I encourage you to go over there and take a look.
Defiitely related posts:
Torch Lake Views 
jolli
April 7, 2009
It was a good one……I like the colors in the first one. Thanks…Greg
Connie Claar
April 8, 2009
Beautiful…thanks.
p.j. grath
April 8, 2009
You would have loved the sunsets in Aripeka this winter. You love fireworks, too, right? I like to think that means we’re alive!
Gerry
April 8, 2009
I am positive I would have loved the sunsets in Aripeka. I thought pretty much everything you wrote about Aripeka looked like a lot of fun.
I’m ambivalent about fireworks. I like them on the Fourth of July. I dearly loved the International Freedom Festival Fireworks on the Detroit River – a joint celebration of Canada’s Dominion Day and our Independence Day. But I really, really detest the every-weekend-all-summer-long-blam-blam-blam of visitors who come up here to make all the racket they’re not allowed to make back home. I am becoming such a crank in my decrepitude.
centria
April 9, 2009
Oh beautiful sunset… LOVELY!! When you’re in the middle of the woods it’s VERY hard to capture sunsets. Love this one!
Gerry
April 9, 2009
Thanks, Kathy. Pesky cameras anyway – they just won’t capture what is plainly there before our eyes! I get a kick out of tricking the mechanism into recording what I see rather than what it insists upon seeing . . .