Summer Waning Strawberry Moon
My cards were good. I won some hands. But. Boy, did I screw up when I took a chance on a hand where winning would have offered double points, but losing, as I did, with below a minimum, quadrupled the penalty. Ouch! Sigh.
The night was glorious. A warm summer night, a clear sky, the kind of night when everyone is a child, just waiting for the other kids to come out, to play one last game, perhaps wave a sprinkler around or sit down and talk.
A night much like the one I experienced in New Harmony, Indiana when I walked down a lane past the only open air Episcopalian church in the country, designed by Phillip Johnson. This astonishing church is on one side of a lane that runs back into a woods. Just across the lane, behind a wonderful small restaurant, The Red Geranium, is a grove of conifers planted on small drumlins. Inside a modest maze created by these trees lies, improbably, the grave of one of the 20th centuries finest theologians, Paul Tillich.
It was just after dusk, night had come softly, but definitely. The lane only ran for no more than half-mile on past the church and Tillich’s grave. As I wandered back, moving away from the main street and toward the woods that lay at the end of the lane, I began to notice the fireflies.
Right where the lane met the woods, fireflies congregated, blinking off and on, creating an arc of bioluminescence. Then others began to blink, further back in the woods. There were thousands of them and as the ones further in began to blink they created the effect of a tunnel of light, blinking on and off.
(this pic is similar, not the night I describe)
Walking toward this between two holy places, the possibility that this was an opening to faerie seemed very plausible, even likely.
I stood there for over a half an hour, neither entering the woods, nor leaving the lane, captured as I was by the sense of a veil between the worlds opened where I was.
When they die, a unique aspect of our life here comes to a finish. It is the unique and the special traits or memories we recall when we speak of them in later years. Celt’s stepping on my snow shoes, barking at the flapping black plastic bag, receiving attention at the St. Kate’s Art Fair as if it were his due. Buck’s careful positioning of the pillows and blankets so he could lie down on the perfect spot. Iris retrieving and shredding tissues. Emma standing on the tree.