Unfamiliar Moon

The title for this entry comes from a spectacular song that I've been humming all day. It's by the fabulous Vance Gilbert and it hasn't yet been recorded - well, not on a studio album - but thanks to the internet, you can hear it here.

So yesterday was Stephen's birthday (yay!) and after I got home from my last weekend class day, we walked with the kids to have dinner at a local Italian restaurant. Yummy food, and we were almost the only people there as everyone else was apparently watching Justin bare Janet's yummily-pierced nipple on CBS. And oh, the hypocritic frenzy people are working themselves into over that one. Show Uday and Qusay's dead bodies during the dinner hour on the evening news and it's no big deal... show a little ornamented boobage, and lordy, lordy it's "obscene."

Anyway, it was a tangy, crisp night following a day that had given us more sunshine than we've seen in a while. As we were walking home, Stephen suddenly stopped and told us all to look up. The moon was bright, waxing and just a few days away from full. Around it was a large circular area of perfectly clear sky, with an outer circle of gauzy haze. It was astonishing and beautiful and even - to the primordial part of my brain inherited from ancient ancestors - a little scary. We just stood and looked at it for a long time. Nathan asked what caused it and neither of us knew the answer offhand. I told him that I figured it had something to do with the cold, and weirdly refracted light, but I also told the kids that it was an amazing and magical thing and that it didn't really matter, right then, why it was. And, I told them, truthfully, that I couldn't recall ever having seen anything like it in my life. Thirty-four years, and this was my first moon halo.

That's what it was, of course. As I promised our little budding scientist before he went to bed, I spent some time online looking for an answer to his "why?" (And, for the record, it was the first question he asked me when he stumbled out, rumple-headed, this morning.) 22° moon halos aren't particularly rare, though they seem to be spotted less frequently than those of the sun variety; once I saw some of the photos online, I could definitely recall seeing daytime halos. But never one at night, and never like this.

Maybe it was just the extreme clarity of the vision that made it so stunning, or maybe it was the unexpectedness of it, the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time. Certainly having the kids to ooh and aah with made the ooohing and aaahing that much more fun; we tried to share it with friends but none were available, so we shared with each other and with a neighbour who happened to be loading up her van as we walked by and hadn't yet looked up and noticed the cosmic display.

I've carried it with me today, have tried to sink back into the wonder of it as an antidote to the low spot I've found myself in. Halos are said to foretell rain and this one seems to have heralded, for me, an emotional change of the weather. I feel out of sync with the season; today is Imbolc... the turn toward Spring... Groundhog's Day. The days are getting noticeably longer, and the seemingly unceasing drip-drip-drip of January in Seattle is past, leaving everything much greener with a promise of early flowers to come. Yet despite that, today I've found myself focusing on endings rather than beginnings, sinking into the sadness of potential loss, steeling myself for heartbreak. As I'm wont to do, I've spent way too much time worrying about the future, about things that may or may not happen, things that are beyond my control.

And that's no good. So I try to bring it back to the moment, to all that I have right now, and play the Cat-in-the-Hat game with Sophie. I take a bath with salts and scents and pretty yellow marigold petals. After everyone's in bed, I light some candles and write, even though I too should be sleeping. And I think about the moon that it took me thirty-four years to see and wonder "why now?" all the time knowing that what I told the kids was true, that the wonder always trumps the why.