Beauty In A Specific Spot

There is a specific spot, on the last paved road before you get to Sandhill, where – if you time it just right on any given evening – the moon's current performance is always available for free. During various seasons, one can view a dangling fish hook or a nibbled-at hand pie, a bleached out poker chip or a chipped china plate.

Even on an evening when the moon itself is invisible, the one or two nights a month when our planet’s satellite hovers directly between us and the sun, it is easy to imagine that the diva is simply offstage for a costume change.

At this specific spot, which is at the crest of a small hill, just past the intersection where a pecan orchard anchors one of the four corners and stop signs only occasionally bring vehicles to anything more solid than a rolling stop and just as the muscle memory in my hands on the steering wheel accommodate the curve that serves as a dam to the pond whose main job is to serve as an irrigation source, I can always expect entertainment and delight, not to mention the piquing and prodding that always reminds me of the simply truth that whatever its phase, I am not worthy of the moon.

Last Wednesday night, headed home from a celebratory dinner with friends whose laughter and stories and dear dear faces reminded me of the blessing that lies in the company of those you have known a long time, I arrived at the specific spot and was not so much greeted as slapped in the face by the full Buck Moon. The color of a blood orange and shimmering as though overlaid with iridescent mermaid scales, it had just that moment cleared the horizon and I could almost feel the residual movement of a bouncing ball.

My first thought was to pull over and take a photo. I've done it many times before, delayed my progress to capture an image of a turtle or the silhouette of a tree or the twisting fronds of a cornfield in drought. It is, though, the time of year when farm equipment wide as both lanes suddenly appear and there was really no need to turn my car into a roadside obstacle for any of the behemoths happened to be making their way home.

Besides, I would be home in five minutes and could get a photo from the deck or the front yard or, if I wanted to be really artsy, from the bedroom where the grids in the window would turn my vision into a contemporary reflection of farm life.

You can feel the lesson coming, can’t you? You are already imagining the foolishness of my certainty that the beauty would wait. You are, even as you read, wagging your grandmother’s finger in my face tut-tutting, “You know better, young lady.”

Alas, apparently I don’t.

I hurried out of the car and up on the deck. The smoky blue sky revealed nothing. I glanced through the bedroom window on my way through the house. Nothing. I rushed into the front yard and thrust my chin into the air, camera app open and ready. And there I saw what was left of the full Buck Moon – an amorphous glow, soft and a dull pinky-orange, behind a swath of clouds moving across the sky.

I stood there for a minute or two in a cloak of regret and then, because it felt a little disrespectful not to, took the photo anyway.

It is one of the hallmarks of beauty that it evokes a desire to capture. In just about any other context, wanting to seize something (or someone) and immobilize it, to inhibit its natural growth and metamorphosis is seen as selfish, egotistical even. Why is beauty, particularly that encountered in the natural world, less valuable?

I’ve made a decision: The next time I arrive at the specific spot and encounter a full moon or a sunrise or a flash of lightning that fills the horizon, I am going to watch and gasp and whisper my thanks. And if there is to be a photographic record made of the moment, someone else will have to make it.

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