MOONLIGHT

I came home late from a trip to the cities the other night. Stopping at my mailbox and leaving the truck, the clouds suddenly parted and I was bathed in the light of a full harvest moon. The light shone down on the road as if I was personally being spotlighted by the heavens above me, turning the whole scene into something both mystical and magical. The clouds overhead reflected the sun’s refracting light off their billowing spires surrounding the moon as it glowed down between them, as if it was peeking between fluffy mounds of cotton.

There are times in life when the setting is just too perfect to turn your back on and leave behind. Instead, you are mesmerized and you want to bath in it and soak it up. It’s a time when you feel the pull—the connection—between the celestial world and the one you’re living in. A time when the setting you’re drinking in brings back memories of another time and another place, fifty some years ago, on a moonlit lake when you first met her. For some time now you have been reminded that you have advocates in those heavens above, where that light is coming from, because she and other loved ones are up there; and you’re down here looking up and this picture goes far beyond a moonlit night, on a lonely country road, in the afterglow of another day. I stood there for some time because something in that beam of light made me feel as if we were together again.

I left the road and stepped into the dark forest alongside of it. The woods at night can be a curious place—so different from the day. It’s as if the trees and the bushes have clumped together for protection; not against the menacing beasts we have grown to fear, but against darkness itself. Tonight, however, seems different. There are, here and there sprinkled amongst the woods in tiny clearings, little moonlit islands of emptiness. Throughout the forest floor they lay like tiny illuminated altars in the darkened cathedral of nature. It’s a place made for lovers and dreamers to come to—and to turn the hourglass of time and existence on its side and to, at least for a while, make the world stand still. Oscar Wilde said, “A dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

Then, without warning, a dark shadow came over this tranquil place as the moon disappeared behind the clouds. Once again the woods were cold and forbidding and seemed to reek of danger. The bright altars that had been so inviting in the forest clearings went dark, and everything seemed to be impenetrable. Hastily, I made my way back to the road that had been, only minutes before, a ribbon of moonlight; now virtually indistinguishable from the woods, except for the hard surface underneath. In the inky darkness, my truck was just a black hulk. My stairway to heaven was extinguished and it seemed as if the last light the world had to offer me had just gone out.