Leaping Against Delhi Sunsets by Rachelle Newbold

Leaping against Delhi Sunsets

by Rachelle Newbold

There's something about the smell of a Delhi sunset.

Sometimes, in winter, there is a whiff of coming frost that eeks over the land with the downing of the sun. In the spring, Delhi sunsets smell entirely different-blossomy. Whether pear, peach, almond, or apple blossoms, the dying day, closing in a sigh of sun, is dizzlingly fragrant. Summer sunsets are more complicated. They are rich with the aroma of ripening fruit~the smell of expectation. They smell like sun screen and algaed canal water. They also smell like tractor exhaust, wet puppies, and Daddy's sunburned sweat. But there's something else. Year round, Delhi sunsets carry the smell of something indescribable. Something slippery and unpinnable.

I don't know why I am compelled to remember the sunsets of my childhood home. Now when I visit, I am awed by the silhouette of the eucalyptus trees against the emblazoned sky. I doubt that I was so enthralled with sunsets as a child, but now they grip me, amaze me. Something about the earth preparing for its nightly rest quiets me. The air cools and the waning light turns the orchards a golden green. Even our double-wide, manufactured home looks like a castle in this magical light. I once witnessed our neighbor's peach orchard, pink with blossom, just as the sun slipped behind the purple Western mountains. Then, the whole world seemed a smear of pink and gold, and in that moment I believed that I too was a beautiful and divine as the scene before me.

In Delhi, sunsets carry hope. "I think the pears are almost ripe." Daddy says. "Maybe tomorrow." One more sunset, one more down, and harvest can begin. Enough sunsets and my mom can freeze peaches and make applesauce. Enough sunsets and I can be.

My family takes walks at sunset, or so we did once upon a time. I walk behind Daddy, jumping into his shoed footprints with my bare feet. My toes make quick, round O's in his sandy shoe prints, and as I jump along behind him, waiting for him to take the next step, I marvel at how big Daddy's feet are. We walk like this while Lizzie, our energetic Queensland, tries to overcome her smallness. She leaps until she becomes a small, dark silhouette leaping against the evening sky. We are all silhouettes as we walk down the canal road towards that unnamed spot where we decide to turn around and go back home again.

I have seen many sunsets—all distinct, all beautiful. Sometimes I imagine they are God's thumbprint, His seal, on each day. I don't see many Delhi sunsets now, but there's something different in a Delhi sunset. It's in the slant of reddened sunlight over the flat, fertile land. It's how the sky blackens in the East and purples overhead and then falls into the West, a wild mess of color. It's in the smell. No matter the season, there's always the smell of eucalyptus as the trees sway in the cooling wind. And the crows, a parade of dipping M's always fly northwest to some mysterious haven. Grandpa's bamboo rustles and knocks in the breeze, but there is always that smell, unnameable, really-though I like to attribute it to tangible things, maybe it's simply the smell of growing.

I, like Lizzie, am leaping against Delhi sunsets, trying to overcome my smallness. And I'm not sure that I've seen enough Delhi sunsets.