Night Light

As a child, I always assumed that night time meant the complete absence of light. Of course, that was when my youthful imagination came into play based on the many Saturday morning cartoons I watched that always depicted "night" as a solid black screen, often with just two big cartoon character eyes glowing in the middle of it. Since then, I've lived in many different places where the night is hardly ever completely dark, due mainly to the glow from street lights and the porch lights that some people leave on all the time.

My first exposure to total night darkness came when I moved to the woods of Lyman, Maine in 1999. There, I experienced as complete a blackness as is possible, which was hard to get used to at first. But it didn't take me long to come to appreciate it as a comforting shroud that descended on my world at the end of the day. The sounds that came from those woods at night also made for an interesting study in the habits of nocturnal animals, and to which I thrilled each night as I turned off my lights.

In time, though, I realized that, no matter where we are, no night is ever completely devoid of some shred of light, and that is best illustrated when the moon is full or in winter during a snow event. I can still remember how the light from a full moon pierced through the tops of the trees to depict their trunks as long shadows on the pale beige ground. As the moon moved in the sky, the shapes changed accordingly until dissipating at the sun's first touch. If clouds moved in to block the moon's light, the night was still brighter than on nights when the moon had completely waned, bathed in an eerie muted glow that cast everything around me into misty unidentifiable shapes.

After a winter storm, however, moon or no moon, I learned there is always some residual light lingering in the atmosphere, and it is this that the snow appropriates as its own, bouncing off snowbanks, rooftops, from tree branches and reflected on every single falling flake. Snowy nights in the woods are far from dark, and I often went out to experience this along with the softened silence and whispers of flakes falling on dried leaves.

There was a full moon last night, and once again, my bedroom was bright and the shadows of trees outside my window sharp and long. In spots, the snow was shiny like a new nickel, and in others, its accumulated mass sparkled like piles of gems, free for the taking.

And once again, I joyfully partook and sent the moon my silent "thanks..."

*****

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

http://www.andreasweb.com/rachellovejoy/

Night Lights

This is the first in the "Fall Series" of essays begun in 2010.



Contrary to what some might think, no night in the woods is ever completely dark. There is never a time when I open my eyes and feel as though I’d never opened them at all. As starless and moonless as some nights are, there is always some sort of light shining from somewhere, and the black treetops are nearly always silhouetted against a lighter background.



Cloudy nights can be surprisingly bright, as the clouds manage to reflect some of the sun’s residual light, making the sky appear lighter by comparison. If there is a full moon behind those clouds, midnight seems more like a late winter afternoon. And on the coldest January nights, the earth manages to reflect the light from the billions of stars that stand out in stark contrast to the black velvet drape they appear to be affixed to.



There are few street lamps along the long stretch of South Waterboro Road that separates me from both Biddeford and Waterboro. Sometimes, when it’s snowing, I turn my porch lights on and watch the soft and silent fall of flakes, each sharing its light with me before disappearing in the vast white sea below. Like fireflies on a hot July night, they possess a spark that is all their own as they fall noiselessly to earth on nights when the moon hides its face. Later, with the lights turned off, the glow lingers across my snow-enveloped world.



Some nights, I lie awake, my face turned toward the window, where I gaze upon the stars, occasionally seeing a light moving among them made by some celestial vehicle bound for parts unknown. On foggy nights, I stare up at a bare canvas through equally bare branches, watching them sway in the wind, soothed by a softening of atmosphere.



Once, on a full moon night, I saw a shadow skitter across the foot of my sloped driveway. It was a fox, probably on the hunt. It stopped briefly at one point to look back, ever vigilant, as is their kind, for danger. It soon resumed its moonlit trek and disappeared into the woods across the road. I sat for awhile, my eyes glued to where it had stood in the moon glow among the trees casting long shadows across the bluish snow. But it was not to retrace its steps that night, at least not while I was watching.



It is never completely dark in the woods. Even on the blackest nights, my eyes eventually adjust to whatever light shines faithfully behind cloud banks, allowing me to observe familiar shapes and shadowy objects that I take so much for granted during the day, objects that, in their altered nocturnal states, elicit a quiet reverence from their lone beholder.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

Flowers

perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. ~Claude Monet





What is there to say about flowers that hasn't already been said? That they are beautiful and dazzling and provide the perfect accent in an anotherwise dull space? That they fill the world with fragrance, or that their colors mesmerize and defy characterization? Flowers are "all of the above," and then some. What sort of nature writer would I be were I to forget that they are the end to the means that millions of plants undertake to produce them?

Before fruit, there must necessarily be a flower, and before the light fades, their is often the last color we see amidst the interminable green of summer. It is the first color in spring and the last in fall as the year creeps again toward winter, dwarfed only by the changing of the leaves and defying the mornings when frost has claimed the less stalwart among them.

They drape our vales and hillsides, brighten our small hollows and ditches, and pop up in our lawns and along our woodland edges. They cascade from window boxes and baskets, paint bold swatches across fields, drip from rock walls and arbors and imbue the ocean air with a fragrance that can only be described as heaven-sent. On a more practical note, they provide us with a tangible means of celebrating certain traditions and, ideally, they make more glorious the last journey we all take from this world to the next. What else can I add that will give flowers their just due, to assign them, once and for all, the status they deserve as one of the most joyfully indispensible blessings that nature has bestowed upon us?

Like so much else, flowers came into this world, to this Earth, slowly and deliberately. Their purpose was to add a final and glorious touch to the vegetation that predated much of what we know today as annuals and perennials, as vines and shrubs, as weed and wanted plant, displaying an intricacy of color and texture not seen in other living things. They loom large or small in the landscape, from the enormous blooms of tropical flowers to the tiny blossoms of ground-cover plants so small that they escape our notice and are often trampled underfoot in our rush to get on with the processes of living.

Yet who among us does not love flowers? Who among us could find anything negative to say once we know of the miraculous journey they undertake to get here and, in some instances, such as the daylily's brief stint, to grace our lives for but a day? A morning glory opens at the first touch of sunlight then fades with the light, while a moonflower blossoms at day's end and fades with the dawn. Lady slippers appear in shady wet places in late spring and johnny jump-ups live up to their names by producing more of their own kind each year without any effort on anyone's part. Jonquils, crocuses, hyacinths and tulips usher in spring while brown-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace save their graces for later when the summer's heat distracts and dismays. As fall extends the year's bridge toward winter, chrysanthemums, both domesticated and wild, share their own late glory with us in field and garden when the rest have called it good for another year.

What would our lives be without flowers? Our tables, nightstands and sideboards would be bare, our yards and lawns one endless unbroken ribbon of green. Our winter holidays would be devoid of the reds and greens of poinsettias and amaryllis, while our spring festivities would take place without the lily's pure and gentle touch. From the bouquests of carnations and freesias in supermarket garden shops to the goldenrod and forget-me-nots along roadsides, flowers persist as an easily accessible source of beauty and comfort. They are small quiet blessings, appearing often in our lives when we least expect them and when we need them most.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

Liquid Light

Occasionally, a glance outside leaves me speechless. It's not that I can't find the words to describe what I'm seeing, but I'm at a complete loss if I try to give voice to the feelings it evokes in me. It happened again the other night, when I happened to look out the window on my way to bed and saw the half moon.

Now that's normally a wonderful event in its own right, often made even more wonderful on a cloudy night when the moon disappears and reappears again every few moments. But on this night, not only did its glow mesmerize from the heavens, but from the surface of the pond as well, and even the word "magical" doesn't come close to the effect produced when the pale emanations from only a partially exposed moon casts its glow across rippling water.

I stood at the open window for quite some time, holding my breath as the wispy clouds moved across its asteroid-ravaged face and then, within moments, set it free again. Each time it did, its position had shifted just a little, refashioning the squiggles of light, shortening some, lengthening others, until more clouds drifted past. And if the scene weren't enough of a miracle, cool night air drifted in through the open window and an owl hooted from somewhere deep in the woods.

Seeing the moon casting its light across the pond that night was like watching a single candle flickering in an otherwise shadowy room. Flooding a room with bright light produces the same effect as does full sunlight beating upon the water. On a bright sun-filled day, the pond becomes a large blue eye full of watery daylight, dazzling the viewer, while at night, a single moonbeam stretches across its shimmering expanse. It's exactly the same pond in exactly the same place, but the sun and moon have their own separate and unique effects upon it, and each event produces startlingly different emotions in whoever is fortunate enough to behold them.

A body of water contributes to such an event in different ways depending upon its temperament at the moment. On completely still water, the effect is one of a wide beam of static light, while on a breeze-riffled surface, the effect is one of diffusion, as hundreds of wriggling lines made of liquid light shimmer in perfect harmony across the pond, not unlike tiny puddles of liquid mercury squirming around on a moving surface.

Several nights later, the pond showed me yet another of the many facets of its personality. A storm made its way in slowly from the west, and the sky turned a deep smoky and ominous gray along the southwestern treeline. The water picked up this theme by turning a deep slate gray, and as the westerly wind gusts increased, its surface became a small sea of white caps rushing toward the southeastern shoreline. The more the wind stirred, the more turbulent the water became, until the rain came and vied with the waves for supremacy. I doubt there was a victor, as it was more of a frenzied dance than a battle, but it nonetheless made for a spectacular performance, one more to add to my growing collection.

I never know what to expect when I look out over the pond or what aspect of its temperament will be made visible at any given moment. The one thing I can be sure of is that it will not disappoint, as moodiness in this context is never a problem.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

　

A Bending of the Light

It happens every year at about this time without fail in this part of the world. The heavy oppressive damp days of July and August descend upon us, and for days that sometimes grow into weeks, the air waves are filled more often than not with the sound of air conditioners and fans running. The sound becomes commonplace after awhile, and the silence almost deafening on days when we must turn them on early as the sun aims its hot eye once again upon us.

Without warning, the wind direction shifts from south or east to west and north, and we are refreshed by the cooler air from Canada that banishes the high summer haze from the landscape. Freed from the ephemerous curtain that hangs over everything for most of July and sometimes into August, objects become clearer, more sharply defined, colors brighter and richer, and we can see again. And then one day, again without much fanfare, there it is. The decidedly altered slant of the light, both in early morning and late afternoon, signaling once again the earth's slow but inexorable tilt away from the sun's intensity. It is almost as it if one day, the light and heat are fully upon us in their insistent mid-year way, and then the next, they have turned their attentions away from us to focus on something else besides baking us and coaxing sweat from every pore. Shadows fall sooner than they did, and birds no longer sing into the twilight hours.

It is once again coming upon my favorite time of year-early autumn. Not a huge fan of heat and humidity, I welcome the cooler drier nights of this end-of-summer month. Just knowing the evening and night will be cooler makes the day's heat more tolerable, and that this month is a gateway of sorts to that glorious season of multicolored tapestries and still mild but bug-free days. There is no question that this cool-down invigorates me and makes me want to get back out there roaming and seeing what I've been missing these last few torrid weeks.

Butterflies congregate on flower shrubs, and birds busy themselves seeking out the plump seed heads of many plants and some species of trees. My little chipmunk friend has been running back and forth across the porch these last few days, most likely foraging for and storing away supplies for the coming cold months. I've started putting bread crumbs out for him, and they are disappearing. That tiny creature keeps me grounded and connected internally to the wild places. We share a common love, it and I, for the places untrodden by the rest of the world.

At night, the window fan pulls in much cooler air now, and a very large cricket managed to sneak its way into the kitchen one day last week. It emerged in another room today, so I gently picked it up and redeposited it outside where it hopped away instantly. I hear its kind loudly now each night, one of the most familiar and comforting sounds of late summer. Its distinctive chatter, which it produces by rubbing its wings together, sometimes manages to transcend the other noises around here, coming at me from the grass beneath my bedroom window, and I find myself listening for it now at night when I manage to resist thoughts of those other things that should be consuming me but don't quite make it across the vast fields of my mind.

The end of August approaches, and right behind it, a month of beginnings and endings. Children will be returning to school, yellow buses will be rolling once again, corn fields will be shorn of their late gold, and early apples will spill from baskets at roadside stands. The seasonal shift is like an invisible wave that I have been riding now for several decades, and it is a journey I never tire of. This is the best part of the ride, when the air sweetens from the rich aroma of the season's fullness, the days shorten and the light reaches me from a different direction. For a few days, I'll see the sun rise through those trees across the street, and then one day, it won't be there. It will have slipped behind buildings and I'll miss its first peek above the urban horizon.

Through the still-green trees, this closest of morning stars scatters its brilliance among the branches through leaves more than willing to help split its light, and I find myself wishing quietly upon it as I would upon any other more distant orb as it reveals to me another new day.




https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876