Gazebo at Sunset

One of the neat things that happens this time of year is that my drive home from work coincides with the beginning of the sunset. I don't enjoy the fact that the daylight is so short, but I do love a good sunset show. Almost any other time of year, I am at home by the time sunset happens, and we don't really have an unobstructed view of sunset from our yard. I am better at sunrise than sunset, I guess; I love getting up early and watching the light fill up the whole world.

An extremely cold weather front moved in Monday night, dropping the temperatures into the teens. Down we went right into the deep freeze! Points a few hours' drive north of us, around Buffalo, NY, got hammered with several crippling feet of lake-effect snow, with threats of several more feet of the white stuff on the way later in the week.

Weather changes are great times for photos. In central Pennsylvania where I live, the sky was full of cloud drama from sunrise to sunset. I had hoped for a few shots of the cloud reflections on the Arboretum's lily pond, maybe even through a tiny first layer of ice. But the lily pond was already completely frozen over. The days of lily blooms and cloud reflections are apparently long past, just like that.

A tiny skiff of snow at dawn left white powder skittering around at the edges of things, and I arranged a tiny snow photo shoot for some of the last of my Dancing Girls that included making a tiny snowman . . . or two . . . or three. You should have seen their faces when they touched the white stuff and found that it was cold! They may have been the first and only Dancing Girls ever to see snow. I thought that one of those pictures would be my photo of the day: a visual anachronism that would provide a fitting conclusion to this year's Dancing Girls series. But the day's visual delights were not over yet . . .

Later in the day, on my drive home from work, the sky was doing amazing things as the sun was dropping. I pulled the car over into Gray's Cemetery and spent four minutes (which isn't long but it can SEEM like much longer when you're shooting with bare hands at these temps) shooting the sunset and clouds. The little white gazebo is a favorite part of the cemetery and the sun and clouds filled it and surrounded it with high drama.

The song to accompany this image is a Springsteen tune, and a relatively new one, as it was released this year. These are words I admit that I myself have probably never said, as I am a girl who loves the light and hates to see it end. But the tune has a bouncy, summery, happy feeling, and so here it is: Bruce Springsteen, with Hurry Up Sundown.