Walked out to the cabin in the dark tonight. Haven’t been out nearly as much in the evening dark as the morning dark and tonight it was really really dark. Last night, or maybe two nights ago there was full moon and it’s still out there. I can see it from the cabin window. The trees canopy the path pretty good though and the tree tops shield the moon.

With my new video craze I was out taking pictures of the moon the other night – about half to capture the moon and half to record the sound of the crickets. They almost overtake the noise of the freeway. I had to walk out into the thick undergrowth to find a break in the trees where I could find the moon with the camera’s lens. Then, as I was recording, clouds went over the moon and swirled like mist and blurred the round edges and covered her over and then moved on so that she popped back out again. I was so excited – thought I’d really caught something magnificent, but then, being the amateur that I am – I couldn’t focus in on the moon and it looked like a golf ball sitting on a black tarp.

Despite the moon tonight, there’s a different quality to the darkness. I know the path out here like I know Henry’s got his mother’s neck, the neck that used to make me almost weep when she was a little girl – this skinny little neck so fine and fragile. Still, there was a shape at my feet that I paused over as I walked around it…just a dark shape. There wasn’t enough illumination to define the edges of anything. It was a swampy mess of darkness.

There was the place where the tree branches hang low and I walked automatically around that, but still it was odd. Odd when the place you know so well feels suddenly unknown.

I could use the yard light, but I don’t.