The typical sunrise in Marana is different from the typical sunrise in Columbus. Because Marana is located in the middle of the Sonoran desert, the sunrises are often cloudless–as this morning’s sunrise, shown above, demonstrates. As a result, there is no dramatic underlighting of thunderheads on the horizon that can make Midwestern sunrises so colorful. Instead, you see a warm glow above the Tortolita Mountains to the east that gets gradually brighter until suddenly the sun clears the mountaintops and you immediately need to don your sunglasses.
Sunrise is a good time to be out and about this time of year, when the midday temperatures are in the 90s and bright sunshine is forecast. It is a very quiet, peaceful time, too.
We’re staying close to downtown Vermilion, and this morning I decided to walk down to the lakefront area, where I stood next to the iconic lighthouse to watch the sunrise. It was a cold, clear morning that gave a hint of the autumnal weather to come. The waters of Ohio’s great lake were calm, the clouds were banked against the far eastern horizon and began to glow as the sun started to rise, and a passing train sounded its whistle and rumbled through town. To the west, the moon hung low in the sky, casting a silvery light on the waters of Lake Erie.
My grandmother, recognizing my early riser tendencies, often said that I “get up at the crack of dawn.” Today we’re out in Big Sky, Montana for a wedding, and true to my roots I got up early and walked out to watch dawn break over the mountains. Grandma Neal would have enjoyed the scene, because the first glimmer of the rising sun appeared in a crack between the mountain peaks to the east.
It was clear as crystal and bracingly cold when I took this photo at about 5:30 a.m. Mountain Time. The temperature was in the low 40s and there wasn’t a breath of wind as color began to return to the big sky above Big Sky. Having seen the crack of dawn, it was time to go back into the hotel and pour myself a cup of hot coffee from the lobby coffee stand.
We’ll be leaving Monemvasia this morning, regrettably, so I wanted to get up early to catch the sunrise as it greeted the great rock. It was a beautiful, clear, and cool morning, with the gentle surf rustling the pebbles on the beach.
I’ll have some more to say about Monemvasia and, particularly, our visit to the old, abandoned upper town on the very top of the rock, but for now I will just say this: I’m glad I visited this lovely, unique place, and encourage others to do so if they are looking for an interesting place that is a bit off the beaten track.
We’re getting ready to do some home decorating in the near future, so we’ve been doing a lot of talking about color palettes and “vision boards” and other decorating-related concepts.
This morning I was greeted by a pre-sunrise scene that had what I considered to be a pretty compelling palette, with lightening shades of blue, a band of coral, warm reds and oranges, and a hint of the yellow to come. The gray clouds and the harbor water would be the “accent colors,” I guess. The only thing that is missing is those evocative paint store names for the colors, like “seashell gray” or “sunflower yellow.” In any case, it’s a palette that goes well together.
I’d love to get a look at Mother Nature’s “vision board” for today., but she is notoriously close to the vest about that.
When ended our visit to Marana, Arizona today with an early wake-up call and flight back to Columbus. As a result, we were treated to a pretty sunrise over the Tortolita Mountains as we began our journey.
This Thursday morning I woke up early, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to awaken the rest of our merry band of travelers. I fixed myself a cup of strong coffee, opened the door to the patio, and stepped outside to feel the pre-dawn coolness of the air and listen to the chirps and coos of the neighborhood birds. The sea was calm and the sun had just started to color the eastern horizon when I took this picture.
This morning I awoke as the first glimmers of the coming dawn penetrated the heavy curtains of our bedroom (4:56 a.m. to be precise) and enjoyed my first Stonington sunrise of 2022. As always, I was struck by the absolute, unearthly, ears searching for any hint of a sound quiet you find up here. The lack of any—and I mean any—background noise makes for quite a contrast with life in Columbus. The beautiful colors and the silence are a wonderful way to start the day.
Of course, “Daylight Savings Time” is an appealing, but ultimately misleading, name. “Springing ahead” doesn’t actually “save” any daylight, it just shifts it from the morning to the afternoon. There will still be the same amount of sunlight on the shortest days of the year; the only issue is when you want to to experience it. The Senate has cast its lot with the afternooner lobby, which has been making constant inroads on our “Standard time” period over the past few decades, leaving it shorter and shorter. If the House follows suit, and President Biden signs the legislation, the change to permanent DST will literally leave “morning people” in the dark for an hour longer during the winter months.
What would it mean, practically? Well, we wouldn’t have to fiddle with changing our clocks anymore. But if you live in Columbus, or anywhere else that is on the western edge of a time zone, you will experience exceptionally dark mornings during December and January. A Google search reveals that the sun rose in Columbus at 7:50 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, on December 21, 2021, the shortest day of the year–that is, the day with the least amount of sunlight. The shift to permanent DST would mean that the sunrise wouldn’t occur until 8:50 a.m. If you’re someone who’s got to clean snow or ice off your car to get to work, you’ll be doing it in the pre-dawn blackness, and it will feel colder.
The “daylight savings” versus “standard” time debate used to be a contentious one, with farmers, people working first shifts, other early risers, and people worried about kids going to school in the dark lining up on the standard time side. But the political winds have shifted, and we’ve become more of an end of day society that simply isn’t awake to enjoy those first rays of sunshine in the early morning Standard time hours. The fact that the Senate unanimously approved the change tells you all you need to know.
I’m back in Columbus, after a happily uneventful travel day. It was weird to wake up in our German Village bedroom and not see a scene like the photo above, taken one morning earlier this week, right outside our bedroom window. So I’m going to indulge myself by posting this last sunrise picture before transitioning fully back to Midwest sights and sounds.
They say that people who live around physical beauty eventually become indifferent to it. So far that hasn’t happened with me and the sights presented by living somewhere with a view of water and sun. Maybe it’s because the harbor views still seem so novel after decades living in the landlocked Midwest, or maybe it’s because my time in Stonington is broken up by returns to Columbus, or maybe I just like sunrises that have lobster boats in the picture. I hope I never reach the point where I can pass by a striking sunrise without stopping to goggle at it, and looking forward to seeing more.
Well, we’re at the midpoint of our three-day Labor Day weekend. And with a beautiful sunrise this morning to spur us on, we are at the moment of decision. What should we do today, knowing that tomorrow is also a day off? Hiking? A long walk? Yard work? Grilling out? Reading? Watching football and savoring a cold beer?
That sounds a lot like exactly what we did yesterday—and it also sound like exactly what we should do today, too. That’s the beauty of the Labor Day weekend.
The last remnants of tropical storm Henri rolled through last night, dropping enormous quantities of rain that left large swathes of our down yard underwater. A thick fog followed the storm. The fog was so heavy this morning that you could look directly at the rising sun as it struggled to burn through the haze. I walked out onto the pebbled beach next to the mailboat dock, stepping carefully to avoid the discarded oyster and clam shells and feeling the cool touch of the water-drenched air, to take this evocative photograph.
It is mornings like this one that will make me miss Stonington when I return to Columbus next month.
It was a beautiful scene this morning, with some interesting cloud formations making for a fabulous sunrise as I set off on my morning walk. And thanks to our tree removal efforts, by the time I got back home the view from just outside our front door wasn’t bad, either.
After three solid days of rain, you wonder whether the blue skies will ever come again. And when they do, as they did with this morning’s sunrise shown above, it is a beautiful thing to see.
The sun rises early here in Stonington, on the far eastern edge of the Eastern time zone, which means there is a good/bad tradeoff on sunny versus rainy days. When the skies are clear, the first peek of sun over the horizon blasts through the heavy curtains of our east-facing bedroom and wakes me without fail. That means I get up earlier and earlier until we pass the longest day of the year. When it’s rainy and gloomy, in contrast, I can sleep later, and I don’t need to water the plants, either.
We had an interesting sunrise this morning. The sky was cloud-covered, but the clouds were thin enough to allow a fair amount of sunlight to illuminate the harbor. The diffuse sunlight left the water looking like hammered metal and cast all of the boats resting at anchor into shadow, thereby creating a landscape that, with a battleship gray dock in the foreground, covered pretty much every shade of gray in the gray rainbow–from pewter to slate, lead, flint, charcoal, dove, and every other shade of gray you can imagine.
It was a beautiful scene as I stood there at the edge of the expansive dock in the early morning stillness and quietly took in all of the awesome, overwhelming grayness. I like this picture of the scene very much, but even so it doesn’t fully capture the live moment.
Webner House 