Dusk Mall/Peach Sunset

One Evening…

I like the National Mall best at dusk.  I look left from the bus taking me home and I see the capitol as if magically lit from some unknown source, the whitish glow heightened by the rich, azure sky that frames it.  I look right and see in the distance the Lincoln, lit up like the capitol, mystic and softly white but also I see lit within it the statue of Lincoln himself: a stark white seated figure surrounded by the darkness of the memorial’s chamber.  You can see the statue at night but, unlike at dusk, you can’t see the area around it.  During the day you can see the background but not Lincoln.  I prefer seeing all three at once: statue, memorial, background: Lincoln in context, surrounded by trees and lawns and bounded by the river running through this city the capital of the country he held together.

…and yet another

From the bus I see wide swaths of a variegated peach and blue evening sky.  The sun is setting over Washington though many people still work in many offices, oblivious to this moment.  I must satisfy myself with glimpses of the glorious sunset, snatches grabbed through windows of the bus, in subdivided bits between buildings and down west-facing streets as we drive by.  No matter what crisis or victory or tragedy or success in this self-consciously important town, the simple and sometimes glorious beauty of nature is, at least for me, a comforting constant.  How apt that in this city, with its vast bureaucracy that breaks down its thousands of tasks into tens of thousands of pieces, each handled by one bureaucrat or another (like me), I can only see it in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs as the bus lumbers through busy, evening streets.

The main color is intense peach, a creamy orangish hue laid on with broad, thick brush strokes across a cobalt canvas.  I see the colors above the Treasury building.  I see the colors over the White House, now gray in the fast-failing light.  I see the vast tie-died fabric of the sky wrapped around the Washington Monument and arched above the Lincoln.  This stunning display puts our beautiful, self-important buildings and monuments in their place.

When I can’t see the sky for the buildings I look left, east, and see the reflected glory in a hundred windows: offices, hotels, the Smithsonian, and I see the alabaster white of the capitol, of museums, of venerable 19th century buildings, peachy pink from the setting sun.  Nature notices us but isn’t impressed.  We choose the color, the size, the shape of our lives, our buildings, our governments and we order it all just so, but a few seconds of a sunset turns turgid officialdom into a Happy Hour party, a moment to raise a glass and smile and toast friendship and beauty and love.  And smallness.

We cross the River and head finally, directly into the sunset, now much reduced, the peach swaths an ugly violet, smirches blotched on quickly deepening heavens.  It is as if the sun is setting directly over and immediately behind the Pentagon and as the sun goes down it pulls the color with it, like smoke drawn into an intake vent, whish, down the tube, down the Pentagon the beauty is sucked.

About literarylee

I sling words for a living. Always have, always will. Some have been interesting and fun; most not. These days, I write the fun words early in the morning before the adults are up and make me eat my Cream of Wheat.
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