The Beauty of Sunsets and Sunrises
Sunsets
I’m not a night person. That’s what I’ve told people for most of my 74 years.
My body clock makes getting up in the morning easy and staying up after dark hard.
Even as a kid, I never saw the end of a Saturday night creature feature. Wolf Man, Dracula, and Frankenstein lived on.
I’m no more disciplined than my friend Bruce, who can’t get out of bed until 9 AM. So, it's not a character issue. Put a second Whippy Dip Snickers Tornado before me, and I’m helpless.
It’s 6:12 AM, and Rebecca and I are visiting her son Jonathon and his family in St. Louis. I’ve been up for only an hour. Last night, we attended eight-year-old Irene’s magic show. How did she pull that rabbit out of the hat?
Wouldn’t you stay up past your bedtime for Irene?
Irene’s performance made for a late night, around 9:30.
The unusual phenomenon I observed before bed was visible in the first photo.
Sunrises
I took this photo at 5:23 AM two weeks ago.
An hour earlier, I snapped this one of the moon.
When at home, I’m usually up at 4 AM. If you’re interested, I wrote a story about how the very early morning routine started. American Presidential Candidate Jimmy Carter was the culprit in 1976.
When I retired from college teaching in 2018, I needed something to fill my early morning hours. Over four decades, I did all my course preparation, research, academic writing, and grading daily before the college security folks opened the buildings.
While I loved teaching, students, and the scholarly life, I never liked academic writing — no passion for writing in the third person on subjects abstracted from my day-to-day life.
However, crafting sentences and paragraphs others would read was a slow burn that always remained. Where did that desire come from? It was rooted in a weakness and a strength. My weakness was a lack of confidence in my ability to grab and hold people’s attention. Falling into a profession that placed me behind a podium at the front of the room was, perhaps, not as serendipitous as I suggested in this story.
Maturing as a teacher moved me from behind the podium and amongst my students. This also encouraged the development of a more spontaneous classroom persona. I told that story here.
Years later, I’m more comfortable with the arrogant notion that there are peculiar things inside me that might be interesting, useful, or mildly funny to you, my reader.
But I must organize the jumble in my head in an orderly way that makes sense to my reader, who has many other demands on her time.
To do that, I need time.
So when I open our window blinds to the east to greet the beautiful sunrise, I know I’ve done something worthwhile.
Thanks to Adrienne Beaumont for this prompt about sunrises and sunsets and to Julia A. Keirns for 31 July writing ideas.
Renee Hannes also writes about sunrises and sunsets.
