Last Breath

There is a moment here in the edge of The Rockies, as unique and precious as faith––maybe more so––when the clouds, as blue-gray as the descending night, settle over the mountains, pile up tall above them, miles and miles above them, and smear the horizon in a kind of melted sherbet haze until you can't tell mountain from sky from cloud from mountain. The long, last fingers of the sun, lazy and cooling in the further west and shielded from our eyes by jutting earth, catch the tips of the clouds, their very edges, and paint them in the most vivid of golds, a liquid metal color, burning and pink on its finest edge, whose rolling boil and glimmering fire signal the last breath of the day. Duncan and I stood on the hill overlooking the lake, which sometimes holds the sunset a moment longer than the sky, and watched light give way to dark, watched the plains behind us and the mountains before us take one final sunlit breath before the fire quenched itself and the world exhaled into what will surely be a glorious and vast summer dream.