Full Moon

  There’s a big, bright beautiful full moon hanging in the eastern sky tonight. It is impossible for me to see that scene without major emotional reactions.
            For all its beauty, it stirs me most with its silence. Against a background of stars and wispy clouds, it talks to me without any sound.
            The experience may be punctuated by a train in the distance, a dog barking several houses away, or the mindless chatter of passing teens on the street.
            But even with these intrusions, it is the silence that I embrace so deeply. I enjoy an opportunity, after all the day’s hectic business, to witness the slow, almost imperceptible, movement of the moon across the sky.
            And, as the movement takes place, my mind does what it does best. It remembers. I gets out its shovel and digs up countless other times when I have seen the same unchanging moon. Yet the experience is always different when viewed through the filter of the days experiences.
            As a child I sat in the yard with a simple telescope and an even simpler map trying to identify craters, mountains and mare. “Is that Tycho?”.  “Is that the Sea of Tranquility?”. “Is that the Straight Wall?”. I never was sure, but the hunt was delightful.
            As a camper I sat at the edge of a lake and marveled at the reflection upon the still surface. A dragonfly would touch the water and the moon would dance across the surface for a while until it, too, regained its solemn nature. Inevitably a fog would rise from the water and the moon would be gone for the night.
            As a photographer I sat behind the tripod and try – always without success – to capture the intense feeling of the moment with an image I could experience the next day.
            And, as a lonely dreamer, I sat in the chair on a chilly deck and wonder how many others were also looking at that painfully beautiful sight, wishing somebody was there to share it with.
            So tonight, as the moon slowly inches its way up into the blackness, I retreat inside to a place of brightness, noise and company. Soon I will forget the beauty, the silence, the memories.
            That is, until next month when the opportunity once again rises out of the eastern horizon. And the flood of memories returns to soak a parched landscape.