Sunset comes early to Humptulips County this time of year. By dinnertime, our sky has darkened and night is truly upon us.  If you’ve been distracted by some other pursuit during a late afternoon – reading or watching television, perhaps – the all too brief passage of day  into the darkest depths of a winter’s night often goes unnoticed until the distraction has come to an end. This is especially true on those days when our sky is heavily overcast, the daylight dim throughout – which, in our climate, are most of them.
But yesterday’s afternoon sky was free of overcast, graced only by an occasional cirrus cloud. It was the first day of its kind: a mid-winter day alive with false promises of spring; a day of sunlight and a plenitude of birds, with a soupçon of warmth suffusing its hours. While such days aren’t truly spring, they seem almost as if they could be given a good healthy stretching of our imagination. Such a day offers a brief respite from the repetitive tedium of the snowless, gloomy days which dominate Humptulips County’s winter, and, as time passes, we expect such days to accumulate into spring’s real promise, an expectation that makes the first appearance of such a day into a promise unto itself.
Reeking of promises real and imagined, such winter afternoons invite celebration.  And since Helen and I often operate at that level of mutual subliminal understanding which comes from years of having lived together (the kind where suggestions are not only anticipated, but replies have been formulated prior to their having been made), when she asked if I wanted to go out for dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant, I immediately agreed.
And so it was that we drove west into an evening of blood-red clouds set among the indigo of deepening night, the depth of their color fading into the rose of horizon, all dominated by the headlight brightness of a golden full moon. It was a magical trip, as if we were sailing to Byzantium on the deck of a many-oared ship adrift in Homer’s wine dark sea, the laboring oars at rest as the ship heeled into the music of its sails and of the endless waves. We said nothing for the length of time it took us to negotiate our private lane out to the main road servicing our neighborhood, too engrossed in the sunset’s beauty to denigrate it by comment.
The sunset lasted as long as our trip to the restaurant, long enough to make an otherwise routine evening memorable, long enough to add the necessary magic to our meal of ordinary, regularly chosen Italian dishes so that each tasted of the spice of sunset, tasted the best it ever had.
