The Moon and Antarctica

Cold one this morning. It was absolutely clear out, which is honestly a nice break from the recent weather. I realize that being a denizen of the Pacific Northwest (or the PNW as the kids are calling it – they’re not by the way) I’m gonna see some rain. I’m okay with it, I don’t like to complain about it, but when it comes down to it, I’m ready for a break. But with the clear sky in January, comes the cold.

Not the kind of Antarctic cold that will freeze your eyelashes or anything, but certainly the sort of cold that will turn every exhale into swampy condensation on your mustache – if’n you have a mustache. I do, connected to a beard, so I imagined that I must have looked like some sort of rabid mountain man by the time I climbed off of Capitol Hill and entered downtown.

All of the puddles were iced over giving the city hundreds of mini ice fields that grabbed onto whatever light was being tossed their way and held onto it like a secret. All of them shown like scratched up magic; the trapped neon looking particularly, beautifully tarnished. I had this mad, childlike desire to run to every one of those surfaces and crack them with my boot, let that frozen light out. I was almost stopped completely by the icy reflection of the moon.

It was a cold and lonely, pale silver, but somehow it was calming. I looked up and noticed for the first time that morning the nearly full moon up above the dark buildings. I immediately thought of Kickers looking for the moon outside the living room window and, unable to see it from his already tiny vantage point, bending his knees, squatting and tilting his head to try and catch it. I thought of all the chaotic change soon to be entering my life and laughed in its face.

It felt good.

The Earth itself seemed to feel an accommodation to change, and had begun to begrudgingly turn a bit differently, allowing the sun to show up a bit earlier than it had been. The last third of the walk was beneath a predawn blue sky that is a color that seems pulled from my very dreams. It’s seems like a blue created by the right combination of words in a Pixies song, a shade of blue that evades any camera or painters brush, a blue that feels like your first solo drive in a car – and you’re gonna take that ride all night and find yourself in a small and empty town when the next day comes to shake your hand.

If you gotta go to work, this is not a bad way to do it. Not at all.