Moon Alone

Moon Alone

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Yesterday’s lunar encounter happened later than Monday’s. I found the orb higher in the heavens, no trees or clouds to hide it.

A thick fog was swirling up from the ground, but it didn’t obscure the sky. So when I went outside after dark, the moon (the “wolf moon” I later learned), was throwing striped shadows across the backyard. There were bars of darkness and light and I stepped through them, like rungs of a ladder lying flat on the ground.

Venus was rumored to be in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see it. Only this moon, alone in a field of black.

Moon through Trees

Moon through Trees

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This week’s warming pattern has brought us back to November: The air is raw but not frigid; the trees are bare but not icy.

We’ve not yet crossed the boundary where a warming trend feels like spring. Instead, it feels like fall with all of winter yet to come.

Last evening, stepping out of the car to get the mail, I paused as I turned when I spotted this moon. It was a Halloween moon that was late to the party. I looked for the witch on her broomstick. I saw instead today’s clouds moving in on a freshening wind, and a blur of light both wan and enigmatic.

Cinematherapy

Cinematherapy

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The Golden Globes have happened, Oscar nominations will be announced soon — and yesterday I saw two movies back to back. It was a double feature of my own making, made possible by an art house theater that happened to be playing several of the films I want to see. The movies were “Nebraska” and “Philomena,” but that’s not important.

What’s important is that in that darkened theater there was no past or future, only present. The elusive present, so hard to reach. The present filled with motion and sound.

It was a present that took me out of myself and deposited me into the lives of others, where, for four hours, I lived quite happily.

Movie-going doesn’t take away our problems; it’s more like respite care. But sometimes, that’s enough.

Decluttering the Nest

Decluttering the Nest

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It often attacks me this time of year, the organization bug, as if I’m seeing the house for the first time.

Why is this basement bookshelf filled with children’s books? The children have grown up. Do I still need that (fill in the blank) jacket, lamp, stack of magazines? Wouldn’t life be easier if there was a place for everything and everything in its place?

When this impulse strikes I try to seize on it immediately. It usually doesn’t last for long. Let’s just say I’m hoping for a bumper crop of trash on Monday…

Ground Rules

Ground Rules

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Today the ground rules. The
heavens send us rain; the ground gives us ice. We are coated from the ground
up. We are bound to the ground, are creatures of it. From it we come and to it
we return. We look to the heavens but are bound to the earth. 
The
other day I watched a show about bird men, people who bundle up in special
suits with “wings” then jump off cliffs and “fly” down. The most crucial time,
said one of the daredevils, is when you pull the ripcord. Too soon and you miss
the ride. Too late and you die.
To pull the ripcord is to speak the truth — that we
are creatures of earth, not of heaven. It’s to say, with a reluctant dip of the wing, that the ground rules.
Traveling Light

Traveling Light

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Speaking of single digits, we come today to the last single-digit date in January. This is cause for cautious celebration.

If today is the 9th, then tomorrow must be the 10th, and next Wednesday will be the 15th and we will be halfway through the month.

Not that I’m wishing my time away. Don’t get me wrong. But these early dates of January have always had the look of lone, lean pioneers. Leave them alone, let them pass.

They are the brave first days of the new year, sharpened and wary. They are simple and unadorned, one digit only. They are traveling light.

Single Digits

Single Digits

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Yesterday I awoke to a temperature of 1 degree F. This morning we are basking in a relatively balmy 5 degree F. Which has me thinking about digits, single in specific but also digits in general.

When I studied “new math” in the old days we called them “tens and ones.”  Maybe I’ve just forgotten, but I don’t think we used the term “place value.” Then again, the “new math” I studied in grammar school was discontinued by the time I reached junior high.

The word digit, though — it’s been around a while. And I thought of it yesterday not only because the temperature was in the single digits but also because the temperature most affected my digits. My fingers and toes were aching with the cold after my single-digit walk (nine minutes, tops) from Metro to the office.

So this post is a paean to digits, to the fingers and toes, the most exposed; to the basic unit of measure, the original abacus; to the root of digital and all the good things (!) that derive from it.

We start with the body and move ever outward. Just think how far we’ve come.

Polar Vortex

Polar Vortex

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Snowmaggedon. Snowquester. And now … the Polar Vortex.

Used to be, only hurricanes had names. Now rain, snow — even cold snaps — do.

There’s something homey about naming a weather system, something that binds us to it. True, there is a cheekiness about it, a bit like the arm-clasping, shoulder-hugging person who calls you by a nickname you’ve never liked or used. But it makes it easy to refer to it later; it’s a handle, a quick reference.

But listening to the wind roar in yesterday, hearing its powerful rush, seeing this morning’s thermometer reading (1!), I have this feeling that the weather would rather remain anonymous, mysterious, even magisterial. That which should not be spoken aloud, only witnessed.

Reducing it to a nickname may make it easier to take, but it doesn’t diminish its power.

Radiant Way

Radiant Way

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For me it’s a return to work after two weeks off — a good day to celebrate the Epiphany, a feast that marks revelation, the manifestation of the divine and, in the words of James Joyce (courtesy of the Writer’s Almanac), the “sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment when ‘the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant.'”

The workaday world sorely needs some radiance, some shining representation of its meaning and purpose.

So today, on my return, I will look for it.

Keeneland

Keeneland

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Walking the roads and paths of this suburban land, I think often about belonging, about whether I do or do not. At this point, it’s a moot point. I belong, whether I “belong” or not! Our children have grown up here; this is their “hometown.”

But still, I often compare the way I feel about my home in northern Virginia with the way I feel about my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. No matter how many walks I take, shortcuts I learn or people I know — this place will never be that place, the place where I grew up, where I first came alive to the world.

On Monday, the last day of a week-long trip to Kentucky, I spent a few minutes snapping photos at Keeneland. I remember going to this gem of a racetrack as a little girl, smelling the beer-and-cigar-laced air of the cool, dark area under the grandstand, watching the jockeys mount their horses in the paddock, joining the throngs screaming at the rail as a 99-1 shot pulled off the impossible.

Seeing it alone, in midwinter, stripped of the crowds and the thoroughbreds that bring it life could have been a melancholy experience. But it wasn’t. I have Keeneland right where I need it to be; it’s part of me now.