Night

I’ve written about the wind, the cold, how the wind makes it cold, snow in various stages of causing me work or misery and I’ll stop listing before this becomes a rant. Sure it’s windier, snowier and usually colder up here on our hilltop in the country but there is pretty cool stuff here that nobody ever sees in the city.

            Tonight is near perfect. There is no wind or clouds. No mosquitos buzzing threats of West Nile and attracting bats that swirl around me like day-trippers at an Atlantic City buffet. The bright moon casts crisp shadows around me and illuminates just far enough into the woods that I’m sure I see things moving in the trees with every creek and groan of snow burdened limbs.

            I look up into what seems to be forever in the stars. I know without a telescope it’s just two million years of light to the galaxy Andromeda. She is the farthest thing I can see. I share the view with my kin from back then. Our bodies have changed, the earth has changed. The sky is very much the same.

There are colors, faint barely discernable tints to some stars. I can identify a few constellations. The dippers, both big and little, Orion. Sometimes the Pleiades are out here, but not yet tonight. I never saw all seven in the city, but here in the this nearly lightless neighborhood I can. I wonder if there are is someone looking back at me from across distance and time and wondering, too. Did my ancient kin take notice of these lights?

            As I look up I can hear snow landing on my nylon jacket and wish I’d worn a quieter one and that I still had the pick up truck. I’d lie in the back at night and watch winter’s meteor showers, the Leonids, Geminids and Quarantids through fog of my breath and cigarette smoke.  I’d lie there until the cold took more of my thought than the flying light would.

            Some kind of owl calls softly and another answers. It’s a cooing hoo, hoo. I ‘ve always called them hoot owls, but I’ve been told a hoot owl screeches and a screech owl hoots. It hoo hoos again and waits for an answer. I don’t know what to tell it and then from another direction comes a faint reply. The first owl ‘s hooing moves closer to that of the second as they call back and forth. After a few minutes it stops and I’m left in silence broken only by the sound of my boots and the snow and my pen on paper.

Today, I’ve come back outside after Auggie’s bedtime walk. Fresh snow and a bright moon begged me to come out and look at my shadow. It points sort of north. I could have brought out my phone or ipad  and used the app that tells me directions and names the things in the sky, but I don’t want to learn anything or be sure tonight.  I just want to look, listen and wonder.