On the Twelth Day of Summer…

…my camera gave to me,

Twelve suns a-setting.

It seemed fitting to end this project with the best kind of ending a summer day could wish for, which is, of course, a glorious sunset.

Sometimes I caught reflections; once I caught a pulse of lightening in a rising thundercloud (can you spot it?).

Some were snapped at the last minute, quickly, while swatting mosquitoes; others were taken at leisure on nice evening walks down gravel roads while savoring soft evening breezes.

Sometimes the entire sky was ablaze with color; once, between storms, there was barely any color to speak of.

But the most memorable one was from the time I went sunset chasing while on my way home from a long day in town.  (That’s like storm chasing, with considerably less risk involved.)  I took off down never-before-explored roads with no other goal than to find the perfect vista—and upon finding it, was surprised to meet up with other sunset-chasers.

We were all ordinary people heading home at the end of a long, busy day, who had mutually caught a glimpse of something splendid happening through the trees.  Each one of us had swerved impulsively off the highway, out of the stream of steady traffic, and chased the sinking copper orb down a tiny dirt road to this quiet little spot.  We got out of our cars, adjusted our respective phones and cameras, nodded companionably to each other.  One girl noted to me, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”-–but that was about all that was said, and that was about all that needed to be said.

I loved the fact that though we were complete strangers to each other, we were, for a few breathtaking sunset moments, bound together by a common love of everyday beauty.  I don’t know if each of us was also thinking the same thing, but I like to hope so, because for me it was something like this:

“Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore!  From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!“ (Psalm 113:2-3)