Harvest Moon

The first slivers of fall are starting to seep through into the air. I am told that tonight is the first night of the harvest moon, and when I walked out with Miley I swear I felt a nip in the air. I felt the same on the ride home as I halfheartedly tried to sleep in the passenger's seat--I curled up against the wide open window under my folded comforter with the early fall wind blaring against my face and eardrums, and I thought about fall festivals and apple orchards and wood smoke and cider and cool soft winds. The leaves are beginning to change. I can't wait.




EDIT:

I walked Miley and then felt that I just absolutely had to come back and write about it. That's a sure sign of approaching winter, right there. It starts.

To begin: we live on a hill, not far down from the main road--so when I walk, more than ninety percent of the time I walk down the hill, and deeper into the trees.

This means that on nights like tonight, when I walk up the hill, I am astonished by the broad, magnificent stretches of sky that hang over the higher parts of the road. I stepped out and watched, mouth wide open, as the cottony clouds drifted inexorably over the moon like obscuring leaves in a slow stream. The air is crystal clear tonight, the stars like diamonds, and the full moon threw a soft rainbow onto the surrounding clouds and lit them up with a shine that was the color of frozen lightning.

Winter and spring, then summer

Here is the difference: I love winter like I love sleep. I love the quiet. I love the dreamy, ethereal qualities of the season, of the air. I focus on the fixtures: the unmoving trees, the pendulous moon, the here-and-gone frost that mirrors the glittering stars in the night. And when summer comes, I am suddenly lost. Where is my moon? Where are my bare, silent trees? Where is my quiet beauty? The leaves grow suddenly so thick that I can barely see the sky. But then the sun sinks toward the horizon, and its yellow rays mix into those green leaves, and my breath is stolen away. I am slowly, slowly coming to remember that I can't look in the summer for what I loved in the winter. In the summer the beauty and magic are in the movement, in the shockingly quick growth of the plants, in the changing landscape, rather than the spinning sky. It's in bioluminescent bugs, and in all of the animals that seem to somehow have appeared out of the ether. Where have they been? This evening I stood barefoot in the stream again, again drinking in the feeling of its coolness around my calves while Miley refreshed herself by swimming in small circles and huffing, and I was struck by the fragility of the water skaters. I was glad to see them, firstly, but (never having done a whit of research on them) I always wonder where they've come from. How could such spindly, tiny little bugs--water bugs, even--have survived such an icy winter? But it doesn't matter. They're here now.


Just as Miley and I crested the hill, the church bells up the street chimed eight, and the late afternoon sun reached over the Western trees, and gilded those standing to the East. A handful of bluejays circled the sky over the neighborhood, calling back and forth. Winter is about sleep, but I am relearning how to be awake.


I am still sneakily trying to teach Layla that all life is precious. This week we've (finally) been doing swim lessons rather than math lessons, and the design of their backyard pool is such that hapless spiders crawl up to the edge, lose their grip, and fall in. They are light enough to be able to stand on the surface tension in the water, and can often cling to floating leaves or make their way back onto the walls of the pool, but they can't make it up over the lip and back onto dry ground. We've been rescuing them when we see them, and noting those that are jumping spiders. They still make her nervous, but at least she no longer demands their deaths on sight. I'm working to warm her up to bees, but I am making less progress.

Spring.

This morning I was informed that the red welt-looking spots around my right eye are likely poison ivy, and shortly thereafter I found a seed tick on my stomach.

A few nights ago, while walking Miley, I heard the trees rustling in the night wind. Do you know what that means? Leaves. When I came home, I found two inchworms in my hair.

Last night I and another person sat out on a curb drinking wine (I from my dino sippy cup*) and talking and watching the moon rise until almost 1 am, and the bats were swooping over the spill pond, and we didn't even freeze.

I'm pretty sure that it's spring.



Also: there is nothing like the smell of calamine lotion. It ranks right up there with sunscreen on the "summer smells" list.



























*who, it occurred to me last evening, is unnamed. How have I allowed this to happen? I think he may be a Harold. Or a Ferdinand. Or perhaps a Harold Ferdinand, which will prevent me from having to make any decisions on the subject. It has a nice ring to it. Harold Ferdinand.

I seem to have a little bit of an obsession.

The moon, which has been ripening as I watch night by night, rose this evening at the top of our hill, huge. I often forget that it can appear so large as it rises, particularly when it's full. This was at 5 pm. I had gone out to sit on the front stoop in the dying light, realizing that I had been inside all day trying to pull together information for the family gift exchange and doing laundry and so on. I wrote (in my phone notepad) that "the road noise is so much louder with the leaves off the trees. It's a constant low roar now, underscoring the late-season crickets, the distant church bells, the dogs barking, the squirrels chattering and dislodging dry leaves. A territorial little round brown bird is furious with me for sitting on the front steps--too close to her roost, maybe? She is the kind of bird whose voice sounds hoarse, and somewhat less than mellifluous."

Then my mother pulled up, and together we watched the swollen moon hang over our street. It was appropriate timing too, as we had watched "Moonstruck" earlier in the day. It was Cosmo's moon.


Tonight Junior, David, Kelly, Maggie and I went to see HP 7.0. Though (obviously) dark, I think it is the best of the bunch thus far. I attribute this to the fact that they finally cut one of the books in half when making the movies, rather than trying to stuff a five-hundred-plus page book into the same time frame they used when the books were only two or three hundred pages. I read an article in the paper recently, yesterday maybe, whose author accused Warner Brothers of splitting the book only in an effort to extend the franchise. I'm sure that the extension of the franchise is an attractive idea for WB, but honestly, I've been wishing they'd cut the books into multiple movies for several years now. The amount of material left out is really ridiculous at some points. It's comparable* to trying to fit the entire Count of Monte Cristo book into two hours. That was skillfully done, but the story was stripped to the bones.

Anyway, the point is, go see the movie. I thought it was pretty great. If any movie is worth your $10 for a theater viewing (arguable), then this is.






















*Please don't hate me for saying this. I am not trying to argue that the HP series will end up on Barnes and Noble's "old timey pleather-bound books you'll probably never read but want in your house so you can look intelligent" shelf.