Ginger had always thought the mountains were simply part of the world. They were there when she woke up in the morning. They were there when she went outside to play. They stood beyond the houses and roads, enormous and quiet, sometimes sharp and clear against the blue sky and sometimes almost hidden behind clouds. Ginger didn't think much about them. Mountains were mountains. They stayed where they were supposed to stay.

But one evening, Ginger was outside when she noticed something strange. The sun was getting low behind her, and the day was beginning to cool. Long shadows stretched across the ground, and the bright blue sky had softened. Ginger was about to go inside when she looked toward the mountains.

She stopped.

The mountains were changing color.

At first, there was only a little pink along the highest ridges. Ginger squinted at it. The mountains had been brown and gray only a few minutes before, but now the pink was spreading across the rocky slopes.

“Wait a minute,” Ginger said.

She took a few steps closer, as though that might help. The pink deepened into rose. Then came streaks of orange and red, and for a few moments the mountains seemed to glow from somewhere inside themselves. Ginger stared. She knew mountains couldn't light up. They were made of rock. Rocks didn't glow—or at least, they weren't supposed to.

Ginger looked behind her. The sun was sinking toward the western horizon, turning everything around it gold. She looked back at the mountains. They were even brighter now.

Ginger hurried inside. “Come look! Something's happening to the mountains!”

A grown-up followed her outside. Ginger pointed toward the mountains. “They're pink!”

“Yes, they are.”

“Why?”

“The setting sun is shining on them.”

Ginger frowned. That answer was much too simple for what she was seeing. “But the sun is over there.” She pointed west. “And the mountains are over there.” She pointed east.

“That's why. The sunlight is traveling across the sky and hitting the mountains.”

Ginger turned around again. Sun. Mountains. Sun. Mountains. She stretched one arm toward each of them, trying to understand how something disappearing in one direction could make mountains glow in the other.

“So the mountains are catching the sunlight?”

“In a way.”

Ginger liked that explanation better.

She sat down to watch. The colors didn't stay the same for long. The bright rose softened into dusty pink while purple shadows crept into the cracks and folds of the mountains. The highest rocks held onto the light longer than everything below them, as though they weren't quite ready to give it back. Then, almost before Ginger realized it was happening, the pink began to disappear.

“No, no, no. Come back.”

The mountains ignored her.

Their bright colors faded into lavender, then blue-gray. The sky above them deepened, and the first evening star appeared. It was over.

Ginger was disappointed. “Will they do it again tomorrow?”

“If the sky is clear.”

That changed things.

The next evening, Ginger remembered. She went outside before sunset and watched the mountains carefully. Nothing happened. She waited. Still brown. Ginger began to suspect the mountains had tricked her.

Then the first hint of pink appeared.

“There!”

This time she watched the whole thing—the pale beginning, the growing rose, the fiery orange along the ridges, and finally the purple shadows that swallowed the color as evening arrived.

The next night there were clouds, and the mountains barely turned pink at all. “That wasn't very good,” Ginger complained. But another evening, after a storm had washed the air clean, the Sandias became so brilliantly red that Ginger stood with her mouth open.

No two sunsets were quite the same.

Ginger began noticing other things too. Sometimes the mountains looked close enough to walk to. Other days they seemed impossibly far away. Sometimes clouds wrapped around their tops. Sometimes rain fell on them while Ginger stood beneath blue sky. In winter, snow could turn their upper slopes white.

But sunset was different. Sunset felt like something the mountains kept hidden all day.

One evening Ginger sat outside waiting for the color to arrive. She didn't call anyone. She didn't ask any questions. She didn't try to figure out exactly when it would begin. She simply watched as the sun dropped lower behind her.

And right on time, they turned pink.

Ginger smiled. She still didn't completely understand how sunlight could travel all the way across the sky and turn a mountain rosy just before dark.

But she knew something else now.

You could live beside something every day and think you knew it. Then one evening, if you happened to look at exactly the right moment, it could surprise you.