Moonshine and snow

Last weekend was one of those extraordinary nights, a clear cold winter night where the moon was a three days past “full.” It had snowed a couple days prior and there was still a snow cover on the ground. The moon was close enough to full that there was a significant amount of moonshine. I took a glance out our front windows and did a double take. It was 10 PM at night but for a few seconds it almost seemed as bright as an overcast day. The dull light cast by the almost full moon was reflecting off of the snow seemed to cause the snow to have a dim glow. I stood at the window momentarily entranced by the sight. The call of my pillows and a night’s sleep threw me out of my trance and the spell was broken. But the vision remains. Two ordinary events –– four inches of snow and moonshine combined to create the extraordinary.

copyright 2008 K. Tyler Miller

Moonshine

I love The Moon, yet all to often I fail to notice how extraordinary she can be. She is a regular in our night sky for about 25 days out of a month. The length of time that she is visible, depending on the phase that she is in, and the cloud cover.

When I lived in urban areas with their attendant light pollution, there were times when she was the only object visible in the night sky. Moonshine had little meaning to me for all those years because lights in the urban night sky masked it. I have vivid and fond memories of my first full moon in our then new house in semi–rural western New Jersey. It was probably in early June of 2001, and the sky was clear. Some time after the sun went down, I took a glance out side and was startled to see shadows. It was extraordinary. I went outside and watched my own shadow as I walked around our yard.

This was very, very cool! I was so excited. Like a little kid, I ran inside, grabbed my partner, asking her to come outside and see the moon shadows. I grabbed her hand, dragging her outside to look at the moonshine and the moon shadows.

That was almost seven years ago. I have seen, and am ashamed to say, ignored many subsequent nights where the full moon shines brightly, offering her soft light and shadows.

Sunshine

I was not quite sure what to write about today until I was sitting in my living room with my laptop doing some journaling. Our house is positioned so that we get some nice sunshine coming in our southwestern facing windows, especially in the winter. It was wonderful to see the sun, especially after a couple of grey days this week and some showers to come over the weekend.

So today’s ordinary extraordinary event is the sun, sometimes known as that strange yellow orb.

The ordinary

I wrote the other day about enjoying the ordinary. Ordinary activities have taken on new meaning to me over the last few months since returning from Africa. I met people who have so little and are among the poorest people on the earth, yet they are warm and happy people. So, I came back with new appreciation for what I used to call ordinary things.

And in the ordinary, I have found the extraordinary.

I get up early four days a week to go the local YMCA to work out. Since I get up about 6 AM, this means that it is just before sun up. I drove the two miles to the Y with a clear view to the pre–dawn sky in the east. And I saw Venus and Jupiter within about three or four degrees of each other. A simple thing, this pairing of these two planets was. Their quiet beauty struck me, shining in the pre–dawn sky.

Two planets I have seen many times before on an ordinary morning. But in an extraordinary alignment.

A couple of days later the were 1 degree apart. But I had to imagine the pairing because it is raining.

I'm back

I have to be honest. I have been struggling with resuming writing in this blog for a few weeks ago. I have been sitting here for about 40 minutes trying to figure out how to start writing again. Write a sentence, delete it, write another sentence, and delete it again. I went on like this for a while until I told myself to get a grip and just start writing.

I can only think of seemingly ordinary things to write about, such as the winter solstice. I always like the winter solstice because it is the shortest day of the year. The winter season lay ahead of us, but knowing that shortest day of the year is over always gives me some hope. It does take awhile before the longer days are noticeable. I write this in early February. A couple of weeks ago, I did notice that the days are a little longer. We go out to dinner to celebrate the winter solstice. I realized that this was my second winter solstice. This may have been a unique and perhaps once in a lifetime occurrence because I was in Malawi, south of the equator on June 21, 2007.

On that day, being from the northern hemisphere, I automatically thought that summer had started. Only to realize that, in fact, it was the first day of winter. And being in the tropics, the day was eleven hours long and much warmer than my usual first day of winter.

So in an otherwise ordinary year, I experienced two winter solstices.