Silent Night.

Monday evening, before I had to deal with a crisis which prevented me from writing the post I wanted to write, I walked for a while up and down my deserted street. The waxing moon, about half full, was riding down a sky that was mostly filled with a mass of slowly drifting cloud. From time to time, the moon would shine brightly through a clear patch, then be obscured again. I enjoy watching the moon on a cloudy night, and the patterns its light makes on the variegated sky.

Then I noticed that, when the moon was held in a small patch of thin cloud which allowed most of its light through, a small amount of that light would be caught by that thin veil of dust and moisture which would then turn a pale blue, almost like a small patch of daylight in the middle of the night sky. The effect was furthered by the fact that the edges of thicker, surrounding clouds would glow almost as white as daylight clouds would glow. And then, for a moment, other parts of the surrounding cloud would pick up moonlight from the red end of the spectrum, and glow like an arc of sunset around that patch of white-rimmed blue. And there in the midst of that magical patch of day, like some day remembered from childhood, floated that icily serene half moon, an enchanted world for the imagination.

Mild

Just enough thin cloud cover to keep the temperature mild and make the moon blurry. This afternoon, the cat across the street was on the roof of her house, running back and forth for a while before settling down at the peak of the gable to watch the day. I guess she is glad the rain has ended, too. After coughing up a hair ball, the older of my cats was feeling frisky as well, and clambered about in the rafters of the garage. Then she sat in the front yard and watched the cat across the street. Our roof has never been quite so easy to get onto, though all of our cats have managed to do so, when they were younger. I wonder if, now that it is too difficult for them, they envy the neighbor cat her accessible rooftop?