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Moonlight in Vermont
by Blayney Colmore
Haunting, that bright yellow object. Some nights it is so clear and seemingly so close.
I felt I had come to know the man in the moon by the time I was eight. He knew things about me I told no one else. Now I turn back to him, looking to revisit those secrets. The man in the moon has transgendered to become my trusted sister, as well as the brother I almost had but who couldn’t survive being born at six months gestation after our mother was banged around in the hurricane of 1938.
He had a name, Garrett, and he has lived these 70 years among the many mysteries I bring to the moon—more to bathe in the light than for answers.
Every month he/she reassures me with that same full face, ready to listen, eking out a little more of what I revealed before my mind became cluttered with concern for myself and my place among my fellows. And then he/she gradually dwindles, her light retreating until the dark sky becomes dotted with billions of lights, from incalculable distances and millions of years ago—stars, planets, galaxies, even an occasional star of our own creation, inviting me to consider my true place in the order of things.
The moon, cosmic neighbor, our closest heavenly kin, waxing and waning, shining, obscuring, revealing.
Our Norfolk Terrier, Cosmos, and I like to go across the road from our old farmhouse in rural Vermont and spend a few minutes with our forebears in the cemetery before we turn in. Although for Cosmos the happiest part of the half year we spend in Vermont is running free in the fields and woods, on the night walks I leash him knowing he’ll pick up a scent—skunk, raccoon, fox, fisher cat—and I’ll never catch him.
Occasionally, when the moon is high and full and Cosmos casts a dark shadow, I can let him off the leash—not only because I can see him, but because he seems to stay still, as mesmerized by the moon as I am.
He and I often stand dead still in the silence one can find only in so small and poor a place as our town. From a small mound we can look down on the lights shining through the windows of our house. I entertain the ridiculous but fun fantasy that perhaps those lights would be visible, like tiny stars, if you were standing on the moon.
A few of our kind have actually done that—stood on the moon, that is. They needed heavy shoes since the moon’s thin atmosphere provides only 17 percent of the gravity that holds us onto the Earth. I wonder if any of their clutter is on the part we see. It seems a wonder and a sacrilege that we have begun to litter yet another planet.
My wife Lacey meant Cosmos’ name to refer to the flower, but when he and I stand out under a full moon in the graveyard, I remember the sense I had of him from the start—that he was sent to us, assembled from primordial dust, a wise old being returning to lend us a hand as we navigate this late chapter of our lives through tides as uncharted as the infinity of the cosmos, that endless dark envelope we look into. On some nights it is dotted with stars while on others, there only seems to be that huge yellow moon. And is that Venus that refuses to have her light dimmed even when the moon is full?
Somewhere there’s music, how faint the tune
Somewhere there’s heaven, how high the moon – Nancy Hamilton and Morgan Lewis (Best version sung by Les Paul and Mary Ford)
No doubt Cosmos understands the tiny hill we stand on is the plot Lacey and I gave each other for Christmas several years ago, where our ashes may mingle with our mother, the Earth. I have yet to persuade Lacey to order the marker—as some others have—that will mark our moment. For a moment.
When the moon is waning or altogether missing from the night sky, the dark can become so deep on a cloudless night that it is possible to pick out individual stars in the Milky Way. Our tiny village is one of the few places left in the northeastern United States with so little ambient light.
Standing amidst the mingled dust of those who have been here, considering how soon mine will join theirs, I consider the stars for a spell. A reverie—that incredible lightness of being—makes it seem that I have been granted a momentary reprieve from gravity.
A taste of our origins. And our destiny.
This biological marvel that is the human nervous system—consciousness, every cell, every neuron—synapses firing near the speed of light, assembling this awareness, all formed from stardust. Like the moon. The Earth.
Heaven—in every religion, poetry, and song—stands for eternal ecstasy because we are from there. Here. Heaven and Earth. It is our own substance.
Fly me to the moon
Let me sing among those stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars – Bart Howard (Best version sung by Frank Sinatra)
President Kennedy, searching to regain the ground lost to our Cold War rivals when they successfully put a piece of hardware into orbit after several of our attempts had blown up on the launch pad, looked up to the moon. “We’ll put one of our own kind on the moon in this decade,” he boasted, unaware that he would have returned his own cells to celestial dust by then.
Lunacy, his detractors said. Science fiction. There are still those who believe that Neil Armstrong faked it. Like virgin birth and bodily resurrection, precious expressions of human desire, the moon worked better as a distant dream. To step on it is to wake us and cause the dream to evaporate.
Loony. Lunatic. As far back as we can look, the moon has had hold of our sanity. Emergency rooms overflow when the moon is full. Werewolves. Hormones. Honeymoons.
I once got a call in the middle of the night from a parishioner asking if I would come over right away, as his wife was in terrible distress. When I arrived, she was sitting in the middle of the road on a manhole cover baying like a feral animal at the full moon.
What part of us is it that recognizes the moon as our sister? She is our kin who knows our secrets.
The first time I scattered the ashes of someone who had died, I opened the container gingerly, not sure what to expect. Already unsettled at being able to hold in my hands what remained of the person (some say your cremated remains are equal to your birth weight…alpha, omega), I was startled at the plastic baggie inside with tiny bone chips. (These days they pulverize them into much finer ash).
Cremation is fast oxidation. Burial of a body in the ground is slow oxidation. When we’re born, we are 78 percent water. We have been floating in water from conception. Burning a body evaporates the water. The part of us that isn’t vapor can be poured into a medium-sized baggie.
Those of you who live near the ocean know that you can track the tides by the phases of the moon. The astonishing grunion run in spring in southern California. Millions of the tiny fish come in on the highest tide, the females swirl like a dervish on their tails, dropping eggs into the holes they create. The males wrap themselves around the females in the most enthralling dance.
The time and date of the run can be precisely pinpointed by the tide charts set through the phases of the moon. The grunion know.
Our brains—which, after centuries of searching, increasingly look to be the locus of that ephemeral construct, the mind—float in a brine much like the ocean from which our kind emerged not so long ago. (Some years ago, I read that if you are at sea and someone suffers a sudden, catastrophic blood loss, you can keep them going for several hours by transfusing them with sea water, which is chemically close enough to blood plasma).
Though we have not yet measured the gravitational pull of the moon on our brains, it seems a good bet that the waxing and waning of the moon exerts a significant—if subtle—push and pull on the pond in which our brains float.
Physics, astronomy, anatomy, and chemistry support superstition, accounting for lunacy. Cranial tides.
We are temporarily Earth-bound celestial bodies, miniscule moons, assembled for a moonlit moment into these fascinating arrangements, subject to the same cosmic forces as our kin, the moon and the stars.
This is wonderfully confirmed now that we know the moon was formed when there was a catastrophic collision several billion years ago, and a piece of proto-earth was flung into our orbit. The moon, our closest kin. A fragment of us.
The high carbon content required for building our bodies and these complex cellular structures that support consciousness must have come from those same cosmic collisions. Stardust.
And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely night dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
But that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song
Beside a garden wall
When stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale tells his fairy tale
A paradise where roses bloom
Though I dream in vain
In my heart it will remain
My stardust melody
The memory of loves refrain – Words by Mitchell Parish, music by Hoagy Carmichael (Best version sung by Nat King Cole)
When Francis of Assisi referred to “our sister the moon,” he may not have known how literally accurate he was.
One night this summer, beneath a bright full moon and that one stubborn planet, Cosmos and I lay down on the ground where we will one day lie for much longer. We wondered whether the almost unnerving stillness could provide a hint of what mingling our cells with the Earth and stars may be like.
No. The conceit that we may find ways to decipher the secrets that cause us to raise religious totems, compose songs and poems, are just that. Conceits, robbing us of the delight only awe can extract.
We lay there a long time. I nearly fell asleep. Cosmos whined, breaking my reverie. Reminding me it was time to go back to our house to sleep under shelter for that night.
Pennies in a stream
Falling leaves, a sycamore
Moonlight in Vermont
Icy finger-waves
Ski trails on a mountainside
Snowlight in Vermont
Telegraph cables, they sing down the highway
And travel each bend in the road
People who meet in this romantic setting
Are so hypnotized by the lovely...
Ev’ning summer breeze
The warbling of a meadowlark
Moonlight in Vermont
You and I and Moonlight in Vermont
- Written by John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf (Best version sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong)
Blayney Colmore, retired Episcopal parish priest, is the author of two books: In The Zone: Notes On Wondering Coast To Coast, and God Knows: It’s Not About Us. He writes a blog at www.blogblayney.blogspot.com and sends weekly pieces from blayneyc@earthlink.net.