Night too Short

The sky put on a nice display tonight. Clouds began to form just as the moon rose, and for a while they ran in narrow strips like foamy ripples on a dark lake. Later, they grew more dense and concealed the moon altogether, while diffusing its light to that perfect softness in which the familiar world is half seen, half remembered. It is with such light that I most enjoy slow walks, keeping my footfalls as soft as possible so as to hear any sound of movement other than my own. In such light there can be surprises, looming from the dimness, but tonight I found none. There were only the frogs and the night birds, who kept to their realms as I to mine. Later still, the clouds fled and the moon cast a cold light, and the trees cast harsh shadows, and I returned to the house. It now strikes me as strange that I unconsciously chose to write of this night in the past tense. I am unable to make it present in my mind. I wonder why that is so? I am feeling a certain detachment, the source of which I can't discern.

Already, a pale light is entering the sky and the stars have dimmed. In a few minutes, the cacophony of crows will begin. I will be glad when the clocks are changed, buying me (for a while) another hour of darkness in the mornings. I prefer the light to linger in the evening, not push its way into what ought to still be my night.

Over there, another of my new icons, this one a photograph of a landscape in the Sutter Buttes. Though they are but fifty or so miles distant, I have never been there. I'd like to go.

Sprung

Balminess persists, and it seems as though the buds are multiplying by the hour. The peach tree has begun to blossom, adding tiny dots of color to its corner of the yard. Transformation is here, though the crickets are yet to join the frogs in drenching night with sound. I have heard no flights of geese for several nights, now. The last of them have surely departed.

All afternoon, there was noise of machinery at a house up the street, and the occasional scent of damp earth. I didn't go to look, but the digging going on is probably to build a new leach lines for a septic system. Most of the systems on this block are probably due for replacement, and the exceedingly rainy winter has likely hastened the imminent collapse of many of them. It may prove to be a noisy spring.

There was also the persistent smell of skunk on the breeze this afternoon. Since skunks seldom venture out in daylight, unless they are sick (and that usually means rabid), I suspect that one of them must have been hit by a car in the early hours and has lain stinking in the warmth all day. This is also the season of road kill, when the inexperienced new generation of small beasts ventures out at the same time that the motorists increase in number due to the pleasant weather. Spring here is not without its drawbacks.

With nightfall, a calm as soft as the mild air has fallen, and I am going to go out and watch Venus descend, and enjoy the other stars before the moon rises to pale the sky and diminish their brightness.