I get back from chorus late in the evening. It’s the weekend of the Tunbridge Fair and Claire was there instead of rehearsal, and there wasn’t the usual carpool with friends this week, so the drive home was solitary, thoughtful. I step out of the car into a night full of stars. I head directly for the tree.
As I rise through the branches I catch a flash of orange out of the corner of my eye. When I reach my spot I look out to the horizon and see that the moon is a slender crescent of dark orange just touching the horizon. It is leaning back against the hills, almost as though it is looking up at the stars too.
I’ve never seen the moon so dark a shade of orange before. ‘Blood moon,’ I think. I stare at it through the branches, transfixed. Then its smooth underbelly develops the slightest texture where it is resting on the horizon. This turns into a raggedness, and I realize the moon is dropping below the horizon as I watch. With remarkable speed it begins to slip away, eaten by the hills. The earth is turning that fast. I wonder that I at the top of my tree am not thrown off, we are spinning so quickly—hurled into the night sky with the stars.
In moments the bottom half of the crescent is gone, and the moon is a perfect dark orange canine tooth at the edge of the world. A single tooth glowing like an ember in the abyssal mouth of the sky.
Earlier this week when I was climbing on another night, very late, I was halfway up the tree when I heard a single wild cry from the meadow above the garage. It came from about a hundred feet away, a single, strange, blood-curdling cry. I couldn’t identify it as coyote or raccoon; I waited but it didn’t come again. Millennia of evolutionary instincts prickled the hair on the back of my neck, though I was safe in my tree and there really isn’t anything in the Vermont woods that’s a threat to people anyways. But it was a good reminder of the wildness of the night—that there is much out there I don’t know, that not everything out there wants me there.
I look at the moon again, at the tip of the tooth in that immense mouthful of stars.
I shiver, and that’s a good thing.
