Recently my husband and I listened politely to a woman with green fingernails and an iphone with a ringtone that sounds like something Michael Flatley would raise his knees to—listened as this lady (dressed in a tunic the distracting green of fairy-forest canopy) told us she drove home from work with a sunset in her eyes, the sky so spectacularly fractured by colors that she broke the law and called her husband from the car and insisted he rush to the West-facing windows in their house. “It was the last thing he wanted to do,” she confessed, “get up and move–but once he was seeing what I was seeing? He appreciated the call. We shared something amazing and calming and real without even being in the same room, near the end of a day in which we’d barely spoken and not set eyes on each other for hours, hours, eons. It was,” the lady told us, flicking her Cher-hair from her cheeks Cher-style, “good.”

Michael Flatley in a few hundred years

“Hi,” my husband said as I balanced my iphone between shoulder and ear and flipped my son’s Super Cheesy Chicken Burger! (organic chicken secreted with organic carrot puree, flaxseed and a little bit of cheese so I’m not actually lying to him about what he’s having for dinner). “I’m in gridlock on the 101,” he said. “Go look outside.” I started to protest, but remembered. “Gorgeous,” I agreed, shivering in the back yard as fire-sky seeped into my eyes–then deeper. Eventually my husband suggested, “Why don’t you?” “Already on it,” I said, fetching the boy (and his hoodie). “Oh my gosh look at that,” our Kindergartner gasped, hands in the pockets of his little-dude jeans. “Mama, do you know—sky starts with an S?” “As do Super Chicken Cheesy Burgers!” I replied. We stared at the sunset. He took my hand. We went inside.

Wedding sunset