Wishing the day away

I’m a sucker for moonlight. I love the way the landscape glows misty grey, light enough to move by and yet dark enough to catch your breath. Just thinking about it lifts my mood to some dreamy place where magic happens.

Last night when I went to bed, the moon shone bright in the perfect position. I love it when that happens and I hadn’t paid enough attention to the moonrise to be expecting it.

It was gone two, and the BH was asleep having left me watching A Midsummer Nights Dream. I’m a sucker for Shakespeare too. If he’d been awake, he would have got lucky. Instead I lay and watched the moon.

Most people like curtains. I don’t, although one day I will get round to making some as I have some super faux suede waiting for a use. Sometimes I wonder about voyeurs, but if they can be bothered traiping across fields on the off chance the midnight movie won’t interest me, I say good luck to them!

Last night there were clouds. Little ones. The best type to have with a fat moon as the light shines through, illuminating the whisps.

If the moon were a man I would be in love.

How many women have fallen in love with the moon? How many will?

I imagined billions of us, lying in the moonlight trough the ages, enjoying the tingling sensation such a simple sight creates within.

But would there really be billions? Up until a few hundred years ago the planet wasn’t so full. And there was a lot of smog around Europe for quite a while. And windows weren’t popular, so you either got damp, cold and/or a stiff neck to watch him. And these things might detract from the adoration.

But surely billions will fall in love?

But we can’t be sure, and I guess your opinion depends on where you imagine the human race going. I tend to think of it as sink or swim coming soon. There’re too many people on our little rock. Well, that’s not really true – it’s just badly managed, but seeing as us humans are too stubborn to accommodate nature, there’s a doubt anything will change as the populations grow. (Or dwindle if you’re in Europe or Japan.) So people will move destroying land and effecting weather patterns as they go, and environmental and light pollution are unlikely to escape unscathed, and those billions probably won’t have my view.

Or maybe the billions will never exist, gone in some grand pandemic of our own making. But that’s even more depressing, so let’s move on.

I prefer to dream the human race won’t sink but swim, or rather fly. Up and away.

Out there. In space with the moon.

When I was nine I remember standing on a balcony in Bermuda gazing at the moon. My father stood beside me and told me that when I was grown up, people would live on the moon. I would have the choice.

I knew I wanted to go.

And though the world didn’t move as fast as my father predicted, when my husband proposed I nevertheless felt the need to warn that if an opportunity arose where I could go into space, then I would be gone (he could come too if he wanted!)

But… as I lay in the shadowy glow, it occurred to me if my dream had ever been realised I would have had to give up my beloved moon as I know him. Without the atmosphere and small clouds, his allure might not be so great.

But beyond me, maybe the billions will live on other worlds. With other moons. On Mars people will sleep in the moonlight of Phobos and Deimos, but will their moonlight be silver? Will they be able to love as deeply if the new moons didn’t help create us?

I’m left with a sense that maybe my love for this piece of rock, is special. Maybe the billions will never get the chance to experience and realise the perfect beauty and awe I do.

Lucky, lucky me. Hurry up bedtime!