Our theme for the month of March is “light.”

I grew up watching sunsets over the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s been one of the few things I’ve really missed since moving ten years ago. Summers were my favorite, when mild sunny days turned into crisp, cool evenings.

My family spent a lot of evenings driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway during the summertime. I loved the feeling of the thin air rushing through the opening car door window, gently slapping across my face. We’d hang out along overlooks or walk around Moses Cone Manor, playing catch or tossing a frisbee around until it got too cold and our fingers were numbed.

When I moved to the Philippines, cold air was out of the question. Most evenings were humid and heavy. Sunlight mixed with smog the closer you looked into Manila. It wasn’t close to the summer days of my hometown, but I got the hot weather year-round, and I loved it there, too.

There was an overlook at my school right above the soccer fields where the sun dropped right behind the skyline. One evening during my senior year of high school, I got into an argument with one of the dorm parents. I felt like they had been overbearing for months, but the moment he asked me to say, “please” when I asked for water, everything snapped.

I left the dorm and went to the overlook—he made sure the fifteen-minute dinnertime minimum had passed before he “allowed” me to leave. Eventually, a few of the other seniors from my dorm found me. We watched the sunset, I decompressed, and we mustered up the courage to tell the head of boarding that things weren’t working out with the dorm parents.

After graduating, things changed. Whether it was late work shifts, night classes, studying, or simply the sunless Michigan winters, I saw fewer sunsets. When I did see them, on drives home, walks back to the dorm, or through a window with no good angle of the pink skies, it didn’t feel like I had time to savor the moment.

I could take pictures (or I could take pictures of people taking pictures), but I didn’t feel like I ever had enough time to savor the moment. The sunset memories of my teens are seared. The sunset memories of my twenties are speckled.

Ever since moving back to the States, I’ve wanted to see the cherry blossoms in D.C. Despite living in Northern Virginia for 14 months from 2016 to 2018, I was never in the area for spring. Whenever I visited my parents afterward, it was always in the summer or winter.

But since moving to D.C. at the end of May, it’s been the thing I’ve been looking forward to the most.

On the way home from my girlfriend’s coworker’s St. Patrick’s Day party, we saw a headline that the cherry blossoms were in peak bloom. We thought we wouldn’t have time to get to the Tidal Basin, but we decided to go anyway because of the warm weather. We got there twenty minutes before sunset.

Thousands of people had the same idea as we did. Thousands of people temporarily lost all sense of personal space, crowding along the small sidewalk running along Tidal Basin, getting in their perfect golden hour cherry blossom shots with no mind to the people around them.

I loved it. We walked along the Tidal Basin until it got too dark. As we walked back to the metro, we saw people walking towards the cherry blossoms and pitied that they had missed such a wonderful sunset.

The warm spring day had turned into a cool spring evening and my hands were standing to get a little cold.

Mitchell Barbee

Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.

1 Comment

Kyric Koning on March 24, 2024 at 9:26 pm

Glad this fondness from your youth hasn’t yet faded. The “seared” and “speckled” line is especially fire.
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