A Midnight Moon

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

A few nights ago, I was awakened at midnight and somewhat jolted to the edge of the bed. Waking up often occurs (for a different reason) a few times a night for me. My advice about that ‘different’ reason is to not get old. At my age bladders aren’t what they used to be.

Anyway, on this particular late-night awakening, I was amazed at how brightly lit our bedroom seemed to be. If I had looked at my clock and it had read that it was seven am I would not have been surprised. But the clock clearly showed that it was only midnight, and numbers don’t seem to lie.  If they did lie maybe this aging thing wouldn’t be such a bother to me.

In the next moment or two I went to the window and was just amazed at the light shining through the mostly closed slats of the window blind.  The light lit the floor almost as if the sun had risen and I had missed it. I tried to silently move the slats a bit so that I could peer up at the sky through them, without waking my wife. (She’s not one who would have appreciated her husband noisily bumbling around by the window.)

I did succeed in craning my neck enough to look through that blind and up at the moon almost directly overhead. It appeared small, as it always does when high in the sky, and it was full and simply beautiful! I don’t remember ever seeing it so crisp, and sharp, and bright before.

The night was a cold one and the sky was mostly clear, especially around the moon.  I took a moment to move the blinds a bit more, to look down at our lawn two floors below and at the bright images and stark shadows cast by that beautiful moon. An exact negative of our neighbor’s white picket fence shown on the lawn; along with shadows from our maple tree and lilac bushes there.

Many times, I don’t seem to think like other people might when seeing something like a brilliant midnight moon, but I do appreciate such a sight. That night my sleepy mind seemed to immediately go to the thought that the light in my eyes had just taken only eight minutes and twenty seconds to travel the ninety-three million miles from the sun to the moon, and another second or so to bounce off that moon and leap its final two hundred and forty thousand miles just for the purpose of slipping between the slats at my window and then brightly splashing on the bedroom floor. How great is that!?