Gift of the Night
It’s Sunday, 4:00a.m., and a just-barely nearly-there almost-full moon is making the condensation on the bedroom window glint and sparkle. In its dazzling white light, every tree limb and curled up leaf, the long old goat barn, the Tacoma, and the birdhouses Patrick made out of dried gourds hanging from the mulberry’s branches in complete stillness are aglow in silver. I only woke up to go to the bathroom. That’ll have to wait, since I can’t pull my gaze away from this not-to-be-repeated-ever-in-my-life scene unfolding in slow motion just on the other side of the glass window pane. I’m in a place that knows magic and how to display it. Best not to turn my back on such cosmic generosity.
A rough go at the math adds up to nearly 240 full moons in our twenty years here, and I may just do the deeper calculations and research to discover how many of them were shrouded in clouds. This is Ohio after all, and we average 178 sunny days a year. An unobstructed full moon sighting is something to stand still and enjoy for a while. What a gift.
One of those 240 moons rose on the heels of a wild and spectacular thunderstorm one day in late June several years ago that used every dramatic visual effect in its prize closet—straight line winds and soaking rains and hail and staccato lightning—all crashing into one another and threatening to envelop us forever until it all just…stopped. Enough lingering drops of rain and the sun pushing back the last long edge of the spent storm clouds combined to shoot a full end-to-end rainbow across the field to the east. The swollen moon eased itself up and just under the apex of the arc’s blurry violet band and hung there as the drenched grass below reinvented the color green. Even if I’d had the presence of mind to start howling, I’m not sure I’d have been able to. I simply thanked the timing of my day’s agenda that landed me in that sacred spot at that particular moment and held me fast to the ground. I won’t forget this. Thank you. Thank you.
Another full moon memory happened in the fresh new minutes of a snowy January 1st back in 2001. Patrick and I had kissed the new year into place well before midnight because it had been a full day’s work on the farm and neither of us expected to be awake when the ball dropped in Times Square. It seemed celebratory nonetheless, if not a tad unromantically efficient. We fired up the space heater in the bedroom and fell asleep in its warmth.
But darn it if I didn’t wake to the gentle and persistent nudge of nature’s call, and there was the moon, out from behind its winter cloud cover, the snow giving back its light so brightly I could see the soft outlines of rabbit tracks from the second floor window. I was bone-tired, but the whole scene beckoned convincingly; in less than fifteen minutes I was layered up and out the mudroom door, walking the seventeen acres to the woods, then back through the meadow and down the full length of the driveway, crossing the icy creek twice as the moonlight threw the crisscrossed shadows of bare tree branches at my feet. I didn’t remove any of my layers until I was back in the bedroom waking Patrick to see if he wanted to join me for a second lap around the field. He mumbled something incoherent yet unmistakably disagreeable, and so I decided not to be greedy, hung up my coat and mittens and crawled back into bed, still content and happy for such a breathtaking start to the new year.
Forgive me if I sound selfish or ungrateful in the face of tonight’s full moon (which I just watched come up behind the lacey silhouettes of the sycamores that mark the easternmost edge of our field), but its brilliant white glow will drown out the tail end of the Draconids meteor shower, one I’ve yet to experience here. I shall, of course, hold onto the hope that November’s Leonids will be accessible to us, and we’ll get a chance to repeat our 3:00a.m. sweat lodge circle camp out, complete with arctic-rated sleeping bags, ground tarps and pillows. But if that doesn’t happen, I’ll at least revisit that reel in my heart’s Most Cherished archive, and bring it fondly forward until the next full moon shows its sunlit face.
Until then, I’ll have one more cup of tea and drift off until that old reliable internal 4:00a.m. wake-up call.
Owwoooooooooooo!
