(Posted January 30, 2010)
The First People call it the wolf moon. It happens when a full moon is at its closest point to Earth; 31,000 miles closer to us than the moon’s average path of travel in its ellipse. I’m sitting here wearing my pajamas and bathrobe in my little cedar paneled writing studio, windows on two of the three sides of the room overlooking the wide open Cloquet River, watching the moon dip behind a line of aspen, maple, and birch across our pasture; the trees, gray dusted with white hoarfrost, mark the beginning of wilderness, the end of settlement. The orange-yellow face of the moon slides behind the forest; only the blazing apex of its curve extends above the whitened trees. In a matter of seconds, all that is left of the wolf moon is a defuse orange glow leaking through frozen limbs and fingers. The sky is an eerie silver blue fading to white as it melts into snow covered ground. The sun is trying it’s best to climb in the east through a brittle below-zero sky. Fog settles over the river as open water steams and flows south; to the St. Louis, to the greatest of lakes, to other great lakes, to the St. Lawrence before meeting the Atlantic where the sun is already shining.
Peace.
Mark
