Sunsets and Droughts

Last updated on: February 10, 2014 at 5:00 am by michaboyett

Sunsets and Droughts 2014-02-09T17:45:55-07:00 michaboyett

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Today I’m over at Deeper Story thinking about the complications of gratefulness: how sometimes beauty exists because something else is broken. And what does it mean to be thankful then? (It’s also interesting to note that I wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been coated in five straight days of rain, which doesn’t undo the drought, but has brought relief to a lot of people and creatures, I imagine.)

We don’t have curtains up on our windows yet, but the wide windows in the living room and kitchen offer a view that takes my breath away every morning when I wake to the stars, and every afternoon when the sun glides away from us into another place.

It’s not supposed to be so beautiful here. This is supposed to be the rainy season. January and February bring rains to the fields. January and February are the months that allow the plants to grow, the months that feed us, feed the country that relies on all these California farms.

People laugh when they ask what neighborhood we’ve moved to. It’s the joke, the last stop on the way out of the city, “the suburbs” of San Francisco, single family homes stacked side by side and pavement, square boxes and 5 x 5 patches of grass in front for the lucky ones. Our neighborhood is so close to the ocean that the fog San Francisco is known for starts here, where we’ve planted ourselves. Soon, it will settle in around our new home. We won’t see anything but cloud out these windows for months. And that’s why we can afford to live in a house by the ocean. The fog changes everything. The sun will still set, but we’ll never see it passing its day above the ocean, tucked in behind the cool, thick mist.

So this clarity outside, these magnificent sunsets feel wrong and magical. Chris hurries home from work and I stop cooking dinner and we wonder out onto the patio to stare at the sky we shouldn’t be able to see. The sun slices itself into strips—orange and reds and pinks—and leaks across the sky’s dome.

If you want to read more, feel free to click on over to A Deeper Story…

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