The Missouri Sky

Whenever I’m traveling, one of the things I miss most is the Missouri sky.  Even during the trip to California a few weeks ago, where we saw everything from beautiful wine country to world class beaches, the sky wasn’t of the same caliber.  Though the same weather patterns can sometimes spawn monster thunderstorms, they give birth to breathtaking works of art.  It’s that sky that helps make the ground so verdant.

Growing up here, you get a sense of when it’s coming.  This afternoon, Aaron looked out the window and said something along the lines of, “… sunset is going to be pretty.”  He was right.  A few hours later, we grabbed a tablet and a camera, ran outside and took pictures to capture it.  These were snapped within a few moments, from one direction to the other.  They don’t do justice to the color of the light, either, which was a combination of blue and gold.  Ten or twenty minutes after this, the entire thing had transformed, again, into pink and grey.

You’d think it would be a small thing but it has influenced the direction of both our lives and career.  One sunset, a decade or so back, I remember walking through the streets of New York City with Aaron and getting frustrated by the inability to see, everything blocked by skyscrapers and cement wherever we looked.  That confinement, along with the tax system, and other factors such as the smell in the train station and subway was one of the reasons we decided not to move into the city and start our business there.

It’s always a variety, too.  You never know which combination is going to emerge.  A few years ago, I posted these photos:

That same year, I also posted these:

Sometimes, you get a certain dark blue light that I love.  Here’s an older example I’ve also posted on the blog:

The best thing is during the summer.  As twilight approaches, Northern Missouri has a certain sweet scent from the grass.  You’ll hear the crickets start to chirp.  That fragrance was one of the things I looked forward to most when coming home for break.  I never got quite used to it not being around during my years away from the Midwest.  That time of night is special to me because I’m old enough to remember an age before Internet and cable, when that moment meant four generations of your family all met up to play cards, drink tea, talk, and joke into the early hours of the morning.  Though I wouldn’t want to go back (life is way too comfortable now), I do sometimes miss those days.