A faint beeping sound emitted from my phone, a sort of pinging tone. It was dark out, way to early to get up normally, but this morning there was an eclipse. The porch light cast a faint glow on the mist, and the sliver of moon left was not as viable through the mist as I'd have liked (it was too misty to see stars even). In ancient times this would have been the remains of a communal campfire. It was already easy to see how an early society might find this whole scenario mystifying.
I had missed the first Blood Moon stage. This I had intended to watch, but clearly I'd mixed up the timing, but at least there was still the final stage of the full eclipse. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the sliver of moon that was left, disappeared into the misty darkness, quite and still. It would have been easy to believe the moon was being eaten by a wolf, by Quetzalcoatl, or by Kronos.
The frost colored spiderwebs stood out now, the texture of the porch wood, the dandelion seed stuck to the faux suede of my boot.
Soon the animals started to state their disconcern. The owls were first and spoke out most often. Coyotes followed, then chickens, geese, and ducks, and a band of traveling raccoons, and some distant horses.
As I waited, I wondered how it must have felt, to wonder if the moon was ever coming back. After all if it had been eaten, there was no reason for it to return. And I waited. It was tempting to go get an electronic device, but of course that would have ruined my night vision. And I waited.
Eventually, I was too cold and tired to wait any longer, and went back to bed. Three possibilities stood out in my mind. First, it had clouded up, given the mist, this was likely, and indeed it was cloudy the next morning. Secondly, I was impatient and waiting longer would have been rewarded by the second Blood Moon phase, as well as punished by further sleep deprivation, as I had only really intended to watch part of it. Or thirdly, the moon was gone, not very realistic from a modern perspective, but I had just spent all that time thinking about it...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are reviewed for content (to prevent spam and filter out intentionally inflammatory remarks), and therefore will not appear right away. Thank you for understanding.