Samain Closing Moon
Spending the night in a Quality Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska near the only capitol with a unicameral legislature. Left Conifer sometime in the morning. I say sometime because I got up at 5am with Central Daylight Time moving my body in Mountain Standard Time. Drove across Colorado, looking back occasionally at the snowcapped Rockies, mountains which had been mostly gray/green on my arrival last Friday.
All the day the nation has voted and I’ve been in deep space with the beginning of the first Formic war, part of Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. Having voted a week ago by mail and powerless today to have even the smallest effect on the outcome, I decided to stay dark and just drive.
A full closing moon rose over stubbled corn fields often filled with herds of cattle gleaning between the rows. Other fields had the working lights of corn pickers raising clouds of dust as they moved through light tan rows of ripe corn, yellow rivers of kernels flowing into flanking trucks. This is early November and the corn harvest is still underway.
I noticed a degree of comfort rose in my chest as I reentered the agriculture zone after 6 days in my new home. In the arid west there are cattle and mesquite, mountains and conifers, but no yet to harvest fields of corn. This place with its Great Wheel rhythms, the rhythms of my whole life, these humid plains and the farms of the Midwest have cut deep furrows in the fields of my memory.
Last night at Brooks in Aspen Park I met Sarah, a Kentucky transplant, from the largish city of Louisville, still not sure about this mountain, winter thing she had moved into just a year ago. A waitress and young she still felt out of place and a deep part of me understood her bewilderment. I also know that if she stays a while, she’ll become one with the mountains and the winters just as I became one with winters and lakes.
