Dear Kitty,

Every late afternoon I wait for it.  As I finish up supper, break up sibling fights and do a final sweep of cleaning through the main traffic areas of our house, I wait for it.

I pass by the open windows that face the west and peek every now and then waiting.

Sometimes in the middle of boiling the pasta or reading another Dr. Suess book, it happens.It never fails that it is in proportion to how hard the day was. The worse the stress, the better the moment.

The moment that the sun lowers just enough to paint the sky and clouds above it. Sometimes it is in hues of orange, sometimes purple. Every now and then it is red; I love that best.

I pause whatever I am doing and watch for just a moment. If someone is close, I will point it out and say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” Most of the time it is beautiful and sometimes it is spectacular. Some days I stand for a brief moment knowing that I just have a few seconds to catch my breath. Other days the beauty of the moment is so fantastic, I sit and watch the darkness slide in as the colors bloom and then fade.

I see it with my eyes, but that is not what makes the moment so special.

In that moment I am reminded that no matter what happened that day, how I may have lost it or how I failed, it has come to a close. Just as the day slips from the sky, so do my failures. It’s time to put them behind me in a blaze of color that shows the beauty at the end.

…and frankly…the painted sky is a promise that a moment of rest is coming and many days I really need that rest.

Categories: December Diary Entry

Tags: promise of rest, putting your failures behind you, sunsets