“Aside from Velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can’t see it, or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of $75 per hour for it without necessarily fixing anything.” - Dave Barry
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” - George Carlin
“I like to think that the moon is still there, even if I am not looking at it.” - Albert Einstein
The first full moon of the new year rose slowly until it eclipsed the rim of White Oak Mountain. Oozed is a better descriptor, not a particularly befitting one, but oozing how the first full moon of 2023 seems to creep through the distant tree line.
Sun down, moon up. The western horizon was bathed in a series of subtle shades of yellow light that only the best watercolorists struggle to capture. The fading light made black and dark, hairlike images of the leafless winter trees in the high fence line. A yellow hew that changes gradients by the second, reluctantly eliminating darkness and slowly losing another daily battle.
There was light left in the moon’s eastern sky. Too bright yet for the stars to be visible to one's naked eye. The moon looked electric. Not man made electric. Electric, as it glanced through the twisted and badly bent branches of the old Black Walnut and the towering Ash. This new moon was bright. Bright like lightening flashes that are too close and go on for an uncomfortable length of explosions of pure energy that no earthly bound man can manufacture.
The brightness is amplified by the cold, cloudless, pale blue of a sky suspending the evening moon rise into deep blue darkness.
This moon appears different. You may challenge that if you care to. It looks different. Sun down, moon up simultaneously. Sun on one horizon, moon on another. How often does this happen? The moon is not big, or golden, or bloody like fall and bug filled summer orbs. This one even moved a little further north on White Oak Mountain for the inevitable ascent.
Oh, I know it’s the same moon mankind has puzzled over for eons. There’s really not any chance that this new years’ moons is some strange sort of a ‘One-Off' but, there’s something different about the way this one filters through that one lone clump of mistletoe in the sturdy Black Walnut.
The sticky seed of the mistletoe probably found that home compliments of the house Mockingbirds that have continually called the ranch home for the last three fleeting decades. The present pair of Mockingbirds have somehow decided that sticking out the winter here, instead of wisely moving south, is rather inexplicable. They seem to find the pear trees warm enough to keep them through another winter.
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee called this full moon the “Windy Month”. The Oneida referred to it as the “Someones’ Ears are Freezing Moon”. The Catawba of South Carolina tagged it as the “Ice Moon”.
Moons calculate time. Time, at times, seems strangely irrelevant when the full moon of January oozes through the oddly twisted and bent Walnut. Odd how that irrelevance of time happens in a new year when you look at the venison cooking on the grill in the waning light of the day and the brilliance of the January moon in the night.
Full moons of 30, 60 and 90 days back somehow look different. Sameness is gone. The deer acted differently under the spell of near past moons. The deer being prepared for the plate was young and inquisitive. A young buck that couldn’t resist what he thought was another buck’s guttural vocalization.
It took the better part of an hour, a long, slow, uphill 180 degree circle before the muzzleloader anchored this inquisitive animal in the culmination of his climb through the hardwoods and up the ridge. Time was irrelevant under that past moon. It was the same moon but it was somehow different. That full moon was larger. This full moon is brighter, smaller, even colder. The windy month of the Cherokee, sweeping away the old years’ haze over the horizon.
The windy month brings 2023 and time either “Marches On” or time, for just a very short while, is no longer in need of any sense of relevancy.
Maybe it is the same moon that mankind has always gazed upon. But, in 2023, this one moon somehow looks a little different.
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WOMR Note: New Year's well wishes to you and yours. May your paths traversed in 2023 all be less than steep and happy ones.