Here we are thinking about the snow we might get on Wednesday, the snow I will most probably write about tomorrow, too. But today it is clear and bright and cold, and the moon, setting, was framed by the trees in our backyard.
A faraway moon this morning. Remote, withholding. Not round and jolly and close by.
A moon that is glad to be going.
Yesterday’s walk began in drizzle, which I cursed silently. Not that I mind it, but my hair does. But I walked anyway, and as I did, the sky began to clear and the clouds piled up in the west and made maps of themselves, great illuminated maps. There was Cuba, or maybe some Micronesian island, and beyond it, some southern coast. And the yellow-pink light kept growing, even though the light rain kept falling. By then I had given up on my hair and just marveled that the sky could be so bright and still have rain in it.
It wasn’t until I reached the far end of our neighborhood that the rain finally stopped, and by then the clouds were on fire, so I extended my stroll along the busy road, which offers prime sunset viewing — all the while keeping those clouds, those pink and yellow clouds, in my sight.
As the cars drove past I thought how few of those drivers (often I’m one of them) could look — or see — the beauty raging around them. The poverties we are given, how they enrich us; and the riches, how they impoverish. This is certainly not a new thought, but an intensely felt one there in the just-past-rainy gloaming of an otherwise dreary day.
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A funny thing happened on the way to work today. Same thing yesterday and the day before. I blame it on my phone, which is also my camera.
No longer do I stride quickly from Metro to office, car to train. Now I stop, look, snap.
What would before have been preserved only in my mind is suddenly ripe for the taking. A wisp of smoke tinged pink by the rising sun. A bank of clouds moving in from the west.
Pictures are everywhere. Now I have a chance to take them.
I may never be on time again.
Yesterday on Metro, uncharacteristically bookless, I stare at the scenery passing by. The clouds were winter ones, thin, remote. So different from the fat summer cumulus. They reminded me of whitened animal bones.
The light almost gone, me half asleep, wishing myself home in time to catch a walk in the brief dusk.
But before Vienna, a bonus — the sun, sinking fast, lights up the clouds, turns dross into gold.
I try to keep luddite posts to a minimum, but the new phone is making this difficult. To begin with, I’m intimidated by the thing. When I do slide it out of its special pocket in my purse, I hold it like a Ming dynasty vase. This is making it difficult to familiarize myself with its amazing features.
My children are horrified that I continue to use it like a 2005 flip phone: “Have you tried the GPS yet?” … “Have you bought any apps?” … “You don’t have any contacts, Mom.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. For some reason I have the email address of a high school counselor from 2009 but no numbers for people I actually need to reach.
And then there’s the way that the phone completes my words and sentences. I’m a writer; I’d rather do this myself.
But there is hope. Last night a satisfied user I met at a party told me what made him buy his iPhone — an app called Night Sky. “The phone knows where you are and it shows you all the constellations and their names,” he said.
Then he whipped out his iPhone — and the roof flew away and the people, too. And it reminded me of once when Tom and I were driving in Wyoming late at night and stopped to put oil in the car and looked up, almost accidentally, and could not believe our eyes.
A phone that brings the heavens into view. I’ll buy that.
It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 17 astronauts’ famous photo of earth from space, the Writer’s Almanac tells me. It was the first time our planet was photographed whole and entire, its mountains and deserts and oceans in clear relief. Clouds like tufts of baby’s hair after a bath, when you comb it, still wet, into ridges and whorls.
It is a snapshot in time — a cyclone forms over the Indian Ocean — but so much more. It is our own precious, fragile earth. And it was the last time humans would be in a position to photograph it. (Robots were in charge of subsequent lunar missions.)
Just coincidentally, the Writer’s Almanac informs me that today is also the birthday of writer Willa Cather, who said, “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”
When we see our planet from space, how can we not love it more? Not just our own corner of it, but all of it. How can we not want to do everything we can to protect it?
Photo: NASA
“I loved the place I was losing, the place that years of our lives had worn smooth.”
Wallace Stegner
On a walk yesterday, I imagined how I would feel if we were leaving the suburbs I’ve railed against for years. Would I slip off the yoke of commuting and slide easily into city life? Or would I long for what I no longer had, for morning walks through the meadow, afternoon ambles in the woods; for a pond that reflects the heavens back to us.
We have not worn our lives smooth. Suburban living exhausts because it demands daily compromise; it is not easily knowable. It changes enough to thwart routine.
What wears smooth is the woodland path, the trickling stream, the natural world that the suburbs cannot quite eradicate.
On my drive west Saturday I followed the moon as it slid slowly toward the horizon. It was a beacon for the early hours of my trip, the ones I struggle with most because it’s dark and I’m tired and the steaming mug of tea has cooled and there are hours to go before I enter the Bluegrass state.
But the moon was dramatic in its slantwise trip, thanks to its full state and to the banks of clouds that colored in its wake. It seemed even larger as it reached the horizon. Big and glorious and sun-like in its setting. A full moon can mimic the sun much better than a half or a crescent.
I realized, though, as I admired the moonset, how sun-centric I am, how I compare the satellite unfairly with the star. The moon has its own motions and missions and poetry.
I missed the moonset’s final moments, because by then I was driving south through the Shenandoah Valley and the western sky was hidden from view. But it was there when I needed it most.
(A partial-moon moonset viewed from our house.)
I went there once, a hurried pilgrim on my way home. Time to stop but not reflect. I vow to go there again, to walk the fields in silence, to meditate upon this number — 23,000 — the tally of soldiers killed or missing during the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862.
It was the single greatest one-day loss of American life. It happened less than two hours from here.
The landscape now is serene. It’s up to us to imagine the horror.
Burnside Bridge on September 1862 (photo by Alexander Gardner, courtesy Library of Congress) and in 2008.
“Do we have a shell I could take to school for my photography class?” Celia asked this morning.
Shells? Do we have shells?
We have them from Topsail in 1996, Oregon in 1999, Clearwater in 2004, Chincoteague in 1997, 2003, 2008, 2011 and, from this year, shells still in the plastic bag I hurriedly stuffed them in two weeks ago. I stuck the bag in the garage and forgot about it until this morning.
I opened the bag, and there they were again: shark eyes, whelks, jingles, clams, cockles and half an angel shell.
I remember the long walk on the beach the afternoon I found most of them, the ridges and hills where the sand wasn’t graded, trudging and trudging until I couldn’t see another soul and finally, finally coming to the end.
The vacation has been over for two weeks. The shells — and the memory of that walk — remain.
Photo: InsideFlorida.com
