I thought the fires were out.
For a stretch there, the smoke that had been turning our sunrises into something molten and strange had cleared, and I’d gone back to ordinary skies. Not that they were ordinary, exactly. After a run of clouds and rain, even a plain sun coming up clean over the York feels like a gift. I’d made my peace with the everyday light.
And then I heard the smoke was coming back, and something in me quickened. A quiver of pure excitement I almost felt guilty for because I knew what it meant: the wildfire sun was returning, and there is nothing else in the sky like it.
I have been watching the sun come up over the water for more than a year and a half now, nearly every morning, dawn and dusk both. That kind of devotion changes you. There is a familiarity to the light now. I can often guess what the sky is about to do, read the clouds like a face I know well. And still, it surprises me all the time, transforms itself over the course of an hour into something I didn’t see coming. The wildfire sun is the surprise I go looking for.
So, I chased it. I knew it would set early this time, fifteen minutes before its appointed hour, sinking beneath the thick haze that hugs the horizon and swallows it whole. I was ready. I started at one dock in Poquoson and watched it drop behind a building, then drove two miles to another wharf to catch what was left. Later, at the edge of the creek, I set my camera down after the sun was gone and just sat there while a nearly full moon rose bright behind me.
What I was thinking was that the sun was red because something, somewhere far away, was burning.
The color I drove across the county to chase is made of destruction. It’s smoke from fires hundreds of miles off, carried all this way on the wind, refracting the light into something otherworldly and gorgeous and grieved. Sitting by Bennett Creek, I thought about the loss behind the color. How pain travels, how it spreads through the air the way it spreads through empathy, how that red moon was beautiful precisely because of what was lost to make it.
The glory I was chasing was refracted grief.
I realized, sitting there, why I love it so much, why I feel so right under that sun.
There is still so much grief inside me. Most days I carry it fairly well, and that doesn’t disappear because the calendar turns. However, under the wildfire sun, something happens to that grief. It softens. It lessens. It is met by a sky that is doing the exact same thing I am doing, holding beauty and ruin in the same breath, and for an hour I am not the only one. The red sun matches my insides. I don’t have to perform being healed beneath it. I get to be as full of ashes as I actually am, and so is the sky, and somehow that is the most comforting thing in the world.
The wildfire sun came back the same week something in my life was trying to pull me under. I needed a stronger fire to chase, and it arrived right on time.
I had been spiraling over a development in the criminal case. Then, the smoke rolled back in, and it gave me something truer to fix my eyes on. Last night, I returned to Riverview Farm Park and climbed over a railing to get an unobstructed frame. I watched a strong, steady beam of light lay itself across the creek, saw the clouds pass in front of it and change it, moved my own body until the beam fell exactly across a boat on the dock. I move, and the light follows. Strangers stopped beside me to marvel, not knowing why the sun had gone so red. I was happy to explain.
And it set me still.
That is what the wildfire sun does that the ordinary one, for all my love of it, does not. It stops me. It sets me down in front of God and holds me there. Awake. Waiting. Expecting. Grateful. Still. I came to the water spinning and I left it quiet, and I don’t have a better word for that than mercy.
A woman I met recently, standing on her own property watching her own sunset, told me what she has learned about the sun over eight years of paying attention. How it doesn’t set in the same place or at the same time, how it travels a slow arc across the seasons, how she waits all year for winter when it will finally set over the Warwick. I got chills as she talked, and it took me a moment to understand why.
She was describing, from the far end of the day, exactly what I had discovered for myself at dawn.
No one taught me to read the sky in school. I learned it the way she did, morning after morning by showing up. And to stand next to someone who had come to the same knowledge from the opposite direction, sunset to my sunrise, was to feel strangely confirmed. It was as if the sky had been telling both of us the truth all along, and we had both been faithful enough to listen.
This summer has turned out to be anything but what I’d predicted.
When it started, the only dates on my calendar were court dates and therapy appointments. That was it. That was the whole of what I had to look forward to, and I was afraid, genuinely afraid, that there was nothing else coming.
I was so wrong.
Every single day since, I have had somewhere to be at first light and last. When my friends and I make plans, we choose the places by whether I can slip away to chase the sunset nearby and slip back. When there are no plans at all, I still have plans because the water is always there and the light is always doing something. The best evenings are the slow ones, where I can arrive early and stay late and watch God’s show unfold.
I worried this season would hold nothing. It has held the sky. The sky has held me.
Scripture says, “He will give a beautiful headdress instead of ashes.”
That’s the promise I used to read as a trade. Ashes handed over, beauty received, the ugly swapped clean for the lovely. These days, the wildfire sun has been whispering something more honest. The beauty and the ashes are not two separate things exchanged at a counter. The beauty is made of the ashes. The fire is what turns the sun that impossible red. God is not erasing what burned… He is refracting it into something I can’t tear my gaze from.
I think this is what God is doing with me, too. He’s not swapping my ruined life for a shiny replacement, but taking the actual ashes of it and bending the light through them until even the wreckage glows. He’s rebuilding me through His reflection in the water one sunrise, one sunset, at a time.
Maybe that’s why the woman at Merry Point and I both get chills at the water’s edge, she at dusk and I at dawn. It isn’t only that the sky is beautiful. It’s that the sky is doing, out loud and in color, the thing we are each praying will happen inside us. She has watched the sun move its slow arc for eight years and it has restored her soul at sunset. It has restored mine at sunrise. Same God, opposite ends of the day, just two women looking up and being quietly put back together by light neither of us made.
And I don’t think it’s only us.
If you are carrying ashes right now, I want you to know the smoke doesn’t have to clear before the beauty comes. That’s the part I had backwards for so long. I thought I had to be finished grieving before I was allowed to feel wonder, that healing meant the fire going out. But the most beautiful sun I have ever stood under is red because something is still burning. Your grief does not disqualify you from glory. It might be the very thing the light is refracting through.
So go find the water, or the mountain, or whatever your version of the sky is. Show up to it undone if you have to. Bring your ashes. You will not be the only thing there holding beauty and ruin in the same breath, and there is a particular mercy in not being the only one.
And yes, I am still unlearning false worship, still catching myself turning back toward a cold and familiar altar out of sheer habit, but it’s harder to bow to an idol when the real thing is on fire in front of you, turning grief itself to gold.
The fires will clear eventually, and I’ll go back to the ordinary sun and love it too, but I will always come running when I hear the smoke is on its way. And if you’re out there like me, ashes in your pockets, looking up at the same impossible red, take heart: given a little time and distance, even grief can refract into something beautiful.
Writer's Growth 