A Night Like This--August's Sweet Caress

   
                        Creativity Project--August 2014
                          Photos by Janice McGuigan           

        
There is something wholly wonderful to me about a night like this. An August night when the moon is high and clear in the face of a darkening sky. The humidity has let up, and the temperature dropped to a delightful, cool eighteen degrees. I feel alive. 


 I feel as though I've woken up from a heat induced slumber. From a dream of days when temperatures soared to heights mimicked only in the depth of winter by polar opposite lows. I slept walked those days too, desperate for relief that spring would bring. And now, early into August after cursing much of July's humid warmth I've found an evening with such keen perfection that I want to preserve it like summer's harvest. Saved for days not yet unfolded when my store's are low and I am in need of replenishment.

On evenings such as this one, I am no longer only me, with all my little cares and concerns, I am fully other. I become that which I encounter; the air I breathe, the sights I see. The boundaries between me and the world external dissolve into an experience of oneness I cannot fully explain.

I swell to overflowing with a grateful heart that I am alive and wrapped in skin to feel the cool caress of nighttime air as it descends, dew laden, onto me alongside the plants I'm tending. And happy too for eyes to see the majesty of all I am taking in. The delicate Queen Anne's Lace of considerable height in my front ditch, the tomatoes and peppers in our little south facing garden. 

And I am thankful too for a nose to drink in the heady fragrance of sweet clover as it intermingles with the creeping thyme I'm walking on, each in competition for the sunnier locales in our front yard. And for the scent the soil gives up each time I turn it over.

And on a night like this, as I walk and listen to the earth praying its mantra in cricket song, I am too full to recall all that was bothering me earlier in the day under the heat of the midday sun. I know the cares will still be with me in the morning, but perhaps I will have loosened my grip on them a little. Even that wolf in sheep's clothing, purple loosestrife, is a welcome sight as it tries once more to get a foothold in the ditch along the side of the yard.

And all the bright stars, so far away and cast upon the inky sea of night, give me a perspective I don't fully understand but am grateful for nonetheless. Why does everything feel more possible under such a sky on a night like this? 

Happy 67th Birthday to my dear mother Arlene, who taught me how to love a night like this.
Jill