Got home after a long day just as the sun was setting, the nearly full moon was rising over the mountains in the east. Of course I wanted to get a photo (which didn't work out on my phone) so I waited for the moon to clear the line of oak trees along one of the lower fields. I could see the moon through the leaves which somehow accentuated the sense of motion as the moon kept rising. But in reality, of course, the moon isn't rising. What I was seeing was the effects of the revolving of planet Earth, and because of the interplay between the moon and the tree leaves, the feeling of spinning through space was stark. The moon wasn't moving, I was. I felt that I better grab on to something. The full moon, the "Harvest" moon is tonight.
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light, every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.
My Antonia
Willa Cather
