The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.
Stephen King
Although we drive across country each summer to enjoy the beach at Pawleys Island, South Carolina, we’ve also fallen in love with the beauty of the creek at Pawleys. Lying parallel to the ocean, the creek offers a different sight with its interesting docks, slow-moving water, and season-changing marsh grasses. Mornings find us walking the beach to catch just-born light on ocean fingerlings of water. But in the afternoon, we shift gears and head to places west where we can sit beside the marsh and watch layers of sundown unfold in the sky.
The strongest colors arrive in late afternoon just before the sun dips below the horizon — rose, purple, orange, sometimes even deep red at the base. And at that point, many vacationers are tempted to pack up and head back to their cottages by the sea. “Show’s over,” they might say.
But waiting has its reward: afterglow, to us, is the best show of all. A plain blue South Carolina sky (especially when cloudy) can take on delicate colors — pink, peach, even a bit of tangerine — for the best overhead show of all.
And yet there’s more. If you wait for the second act, the afterglow will bathe whatever is below — a dock in the marsh, boats put away until tomorrow’s adventures, a chapel by the sea — in paler, softer candy colors.
It may be, just may be, that God likes to play with color filters, too.
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
Rabindranath Tagore
Thanks to Leya for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #98: Delicate Colours, You can delight in more beautiful posts with sweet color on her site, A World in a Grain of Sand.