For 48 years they watched the sun go down from the same Kansas porch. Now she can’t leave her bed, so the old sign maker built her a sunset she can pull down herself.

Verlin Haugen spent fifty-one years building the lighted signs along I-70. The last light he made hangs at the head of his wife’s bed. He has 248 left, and in January the barn where he builds them will belong to someone else.

Brookville, Kansas. Most of Verlin Haugen’s barn is dark. At the far end, an old orange motel O, pulled off a roof decades ago, still glows above his workbench. Below it, on plank shelves, sit rows of square boxes that each glow like the last ten minutes of a day.

Pull the black ball on the right and a white sun rises out of a dark horizon. Pull the red ball on the left and it sinks again, slowly, from gold to orange to a last red ember, until it slips under the line and is gone.

These are not night-lights. Each one is a sunset small enough to hang beside a bed, made by a man who spent his life building lights for strangers. He built the first one for the only person he ever watched the sun go down with: his wife, Elva, who can no longer get to a window that faces west.

So he brought the sunset to her.

Now the farm is sold to pay for her care, and the barn goes with it. What Verlin decided to do with the lamps still on his shelves has families writing to him from three states.

Nine hundred signs, and one more light

In 1968 Verlin opened Haugen Sign Co. in a rented garage in Salina, with a borrowed ladder and a glass-bending torch bought on a payment plan. Over the next fifty-one years he built or rewired 912 signs: diner signs, motel arrows, bank clocks, the lights that told tired drivers on I-70 it was safe to stop.

“A sign has one job,” he says, turning a screwdriver in fingers that are slower than they used to be. “Somebody’s been driving four hours in the dark. You’ve got three seconds to tell them they can stop. You don’t do that with words. You do it with light.”

These days he drives to Salina every afternoon and sits with Elva until she falls asleep. Then he drives home, walks past the dark house and goes straight out to the barn. “It’s the only place I don’t keep listening for her,” he says.

Each lamp is a slim steel box with an acrylic face, and Verlin paints every sky on it himself, with the same brushes he once used to letter motel signs: pale gold on top, then orange, then the deep red that sits on the fields in October, then black for the ground. No two come out exactly alike.

Behind the painted sky sits a warm light that does the moving. Pull the black cord on the right and the sun climbs a little higher. Pull the red cord on the left and it sinks a little lower. Let go, and it stays right where you left it. Every lamp burns on the bench overnight before it gets a box. “Not fast,” he says. “It’s supposed to give you time to say something.”

Ask him why a man who spent his life on highway signs would spend his eighties building sunsets, and he points at a photo propped on the shelf.

Two lawn chairs facing west

Elva taught second grade in Brookville for thirty years and kept the books for the sign shop at the kitchen table. She and Verlin married in 1967. Ten years later they bought the farmhouse, and the family joke is that they bought it for the porch. It faces due west over a milo field, with nothing between it and the horizon.

Every evening after supper they carried two cups of coffee out to two green lawn chairs. When the sun touched the field, Elva always said it first: There she goes. And Verlin always answered: Right on time. Their kids learned early not to interrupt. “You don’t talk while it’s going down,” Elva told them. “You can talk after.”

She kept a notebook by the screen door for the sunsets she rated a ten. In forty-eight years she wrote down 212 of them. Verlin still has it.

A window that faced the parking lot

In March 2025 Elva had a stroke at the kitchen table. The farmhouse, with steps at every door and every bedroom upstairs, no longer worked. In May she moved into a senior residence in Salina. The staff were kind and the room was bright, but her one window looked east, over the parking lot.

“She never complained about that room,” Verlin says. “But around six o’clock she’d get restless. She’d look at the window, then at me. I knew what she wanted, and there wasn’t one thing out there I could give her.”

He tried a calendar of sunset photographs. He framed a picture of the porch and put it on her dresser. She thanked him and looked at the window anyway. “A picture doesn’t do anything,” he says. “The sun moves. You sit there and you watch it go. That’s the whole thing.”

“There she goes”

So he built her one that moves. It took him most of June, and he painted her sky from memory: the view off their porch on an October evening. He left out the switch, because Elva’s right hand can still grip but can no longer work anything small. Instead: two cords with round balls, red on the left to bring the sun down, black on the right to bring it back up.

He drove it to Salina wrapped in the afghan from their living room couch and didn’t tell her what it was. That evening he put the red ball in her hand. She pulled, and the sun slid down the panel, gold to orange to ember. When it touched the line, she said it. There she goes.

“And I said right on time,” Verlin says, and stops for a moment. “First time since March.”

It became their evening again. While the sun goes down, Elva tells the old stories: the night the grain elevator caught the last light and glowed like a candle, the summer the kids slept on the porch. “Some nights she tells me about that porch like I wasn’t there,” Verlin says. “I just let her.” Most nights she is asleep before the sun is all the way down. The night nurse started timing her rounds so she could stand in the doorway for the last part.

Within weeks, a farmer two doors down asked his son to “find out about the sunset,” and a daughter from Hays called the farm. By October, Verlin was back in the barn every night, building them for families he had never met.

Why everybody goes quiet at the same spot

“Nobody really looks at a light,” Verlin says. “They look at what it reminds them of.”

Most “sunset lamps” throw a flat orange circle on the wall or cycle through party colors. Verlin’s does the one thing a real sunset does: it moves, and it takes its time. Warm light, never blue, no glare, no hum.

What makes Verlin’s lamp different

Closing day is in January

Elva’s room costs more each month than the farm made in a good harvest year. To keep her where she is, the farm had to go. It sold in September. He is moving into an apartment in Salina, six minutes from her room.

“I don’t mind about the house,” he says. “A house is lumber and nails. The porch I minded, until I figured out I’d already taken it with me.” He nods at the shelves. “It’s in every one of those.”

His granddaughter Bryn, a nursing student in Salina, asked the question nobody else wanted to: what happens to the lamps when the barn belongs to someone else? She found out what a sign shop would charge to build a lighted cabinet like this, $250 to $400, typed up a price list and suggested $115. Verlin read it, folded it once and slid it back across the table.

He crossed out $115 and wrote $89: enough to cover the steel, the paint, the wiring, the cords and the box, and nothing on top. No stores, no middleman, and no second batch once the shelves are empty.

Letters from the first owners

After supper Verlin spreads the photos people send across the kitchen table, the way he used to lay out sign drawings. He expected bedrooms in residences. He also got a gray sectional in Denver, a reading nook in Wichita, a kid’s room in Lawrence, many of them from people in their twenties and thirties.

“Turns out young people miss the evening too,” he says. “Elva always said a room needs one thing in it that isn’t in a hurry.”

When the shelves are empty

What’s on the shelves is everything Verlin built after Elva moved to Salina. In January the keys go to a young family from Abilene, and the bench goes with the barn.

There is a second reason there won’t be more. Verlin’s hands have started to shake. The small connectors take him twice as long as they used to, and some nights Bryn holds the flashlight while he solders. “These are the last ones these hands are going to make,” he says. “I’d rather they hang somewhere they’re needed than sit on a shelf.”

Bryn packs every order in the barn by hand. Each lamp ships within one to two days and comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. “If it does nothing for the person you bought it for, send it back,” Verlin says. “I’ll understand. I just haven’t had to yet.”

If someone in your life has evenings that have gotten long, or if your own window faces the wrong way, this is the last chance to hang one of Verlin’s sunsets on the wall.