I’ve been on the island for several days now…really busy with work, writing and editing, and getting a lot accomplished, too. But I’ve begun to notice in myself–something not quite so obvious on shorter visits–that I am a real deep-in-the-gut sunset fanatic. (Well, duh! I can hear you saying. Eighty-eight posts of photographs on this thread, and you’re only just now noticing how many of them are sunsets? Photographs taken from the very same house?)

But listen, it isn’t just that I take all these photographs of sunsets, and it isn’t even that they’re all beautiful. It’s that every one of them is different. It’s the mystery of these sunsets that has me by the gut, that drives me up from my chair and makes me prowl around the house, camera in hand, heart beating rapidly, taking pictures from windows and decks and the path to the beach. I never know what each sunset is going to be like, in what way it’s going to be uniquely beautiful. I never even know from minute to minute how each one is going to change, how its beauty is going to evolve ten minutes from now, compared to now. Let me show you. Please allow me to present, in close proximity, the sunsets of November 11, November 12, and November 14, 2012.

And so I want to capture every minute of every sunset. I order my days around being home for this event. I have, dear readers, hundreds, maybe thousands, of sunset photographs in my archives, and every one of them is special. I am–I will confess it now–a sunset addict.

It’s been a month since we were on the island–and how good to be back again!

The house survived Sandy very well. There were just a few loose roof shingles, and yesterday Dan climbed up there and nailed them back again.

Then…a lot earlier than it used to be, and a lot farther to the south…there was another glorious sunset.

Life is good, here in the island. I’m glad to be here all this week.