Winter sunsets have their own mood. I was sitting with my dog on the hill out back, watching the sun go down. The whole sky was lit up in a golden red shower of undulating light that was so powerfully moving to me, it seemed like something from another world. I felt almost overwhelmed by it, it was so quietly lovely, but beyond being beautiful, it gave me this sense of longing, something like nostalgia. Plato might have said that something so breathtaking and perfect is the idea or image of heaven being made real, for a moment, here on earth, and that we are so moved by it because part of us remembers heaven as our first home. That could be true, at least there is something about a sunset that communicates to us that we are only here for a little while, and that there is something great waiting for us at the end.

I read that colder air aloft creates more ice crystals than it does water vapor, reflecting more light. The sharper angle of the sun makes for a longer twilight, allowing the reflected light to build into more color. So it is true that winter sunsets are so much more dramatic than those at other times of the year. Despite the mechanistic explanation, I think there is a moodiness there in a winter sky that I believe in more. A sense of nostalgia comes from watching that glowing red ball disappear against stripped bare trees and brown fields. There is a mournfulness about it, making me think about the struggle of life for survival against all odds, but touched with a little bit about hope for all that. A winter evening is a loss of light, the ending of a short day in a season of short days and low light, but even in the darkest part of the year, there is always a resurrection.

The ancient Egyptians held that the world’s evildoer, like to our Satan, whom they called ‘Set’, was pulling God down from the sky every evening at sunset. Through the night, they would wrestle together in the darkness, and in the morning, God would emerge triumphant once again. The word sunset at its root doesn’t have to do with that ‘Set’, so I read, but I don’t know about that. It could be a big coincidence, I guess, that we say ‘sunset’. Either way, the story is interesting because it has the idea of a struggle and a triumph both, like the sunset itself.

This winter seems especially amazing for sunsets to me. I asked my photographer friend Cindy Wood, who lives out in Blanket, if she thought it was unique. Cindy takes a lot of amazing photos around the area, and her sunset shots have been spectacular this year. She says though that she thinks the year is pretty average, that there are always great sunsets going on this time of year. Cindy likes to drive the back roads around Brownwood, Comanche and Early to find her photos. She looks for good cloud formations and eye-catching sun angles to get the right mix. She says she can find a great shot just about any ol’ place, and she does!

Maybe it is that the older I get, the more deeply I am amazed by the whole sunset pageant, so it could seem like it’s getting better each year, when really it is just that I am paying more attention. I find it hard sometimes to understand how people get bored living on a planet where the sun sets every night. There is so much to learn and understand just about different sunsets in different seasons, and what they seem to say to us. To me, these winter sunsets are pure magic.

***

Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com