With just a skeleton of leaves hanging on the trees up the hill south of our house, the moment of sunset becomes clearer. From our dining room window, the sun sinks into the horizon around 3:45 p.m. But that’s a fictitious horizon. The sun doesn’t really “set” at that time; it just disappears from our sight. The blazing sunset—when the fire ball falls off the true horizon and shoots desperate rays onto the clouds like lassoes trying to hold onto the day—that is at 4:20 p.m. This “true” sunset is invisible from our house, but if we drive to the east side of our town’s lake and look west, that wide, wet, smooth surface puts enough space between us and the line of disappearance for us to see the sunset at its scientifically appointed time.
Driving through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, “sunset” is ambiguous. When on a road that weaves around the mountains, I get giddy when I view several sunsets as we fall behind one mountain into a shadow for a few minutes then come around another mountain into daylight, albeit with the sun in a bit lower position and casting a new palette of hues skyward. On a bigger scale than my little hill, if a mountain sits between your house and the horizon, the shade of sunset hits much earlier than the time marked as the official setting. To drive in this shadow feels like being in an eclipse. I never had sunset ruminations like this growing up surrounded by flat cornfields in northeast Iowa. Sunrise and sunset were absolute.
Sometimes my brother calls me from Iowa in the evening as he heads to the timber to do a final check on the beef cattle. Summer evening conversations tend to last longer than those in November. More daylight gives a wider berth for getting chores done. Late fall and winter evening chores are condensed into a tighter breadth of light.
Years ago, when we were putting an addition onto our house, we rented a house on a tidal river outside Gloucester, Massachusetts. I would wake up around the same time every morning, and for several days, I watched a small flat barge out on a job setting new buoys near the outer riverbank. The buoy setter did not arrive at 8 a.m. every day; rather he arrived at low tide. High and low tides change a bit every day; for instance, morning low tide November 16, 2021 is at 3:25 a.m., and on the 17th it’s at 4:04 a.m. So a buoy setter isn’t expected to be on the job at 8 a.m. The tide and the sun determine when his workday begins and ends.
Soon after the addition to our house, we had problems with our heating system. Minor issues at first, but now several years after construction, our son Liam’s room gets no heat, and the heating system on the second floor shuts down when it gets below freezing. While it seems that it might be pretty straight forward to get a plumber out to fix it, that’s not the case. We have heat at the moment, so we are not an emergency. Many tomorrows have come and gone without the plumber arriving as planned—and without excuse. But we give him the benefit of the doubt in the assumption that he’s fixing other problems for people in more dire situations. His workflow is riding its own tide, and it’s a painful rub for us.
As much as I’d like to think I work best with the pattern of the same day, the same time, the same place, there’s little doubt that my basic nature developed with the seasonal pulls of farm life. The frost breaks, the ground warms, the corn is planted. The hay grows, it’s a dry forecast, the hay is cut, the sun dries it, the hay is baled. The corn stalks dry, the moisture in the kernels is low, the corn is picked. None of these happen on April 15th, July 15th, or October 15th, respectively. It simply cannot be willed so. Neither living there nor born here, I find the timing of tasks to be a mucky pursuit—and lose patience when working to fit a tidal schedule into a timetable driven life.