It’s the way of this part of the year; the days bleed into each...

It’s the way of this part of the year; the days bleed into each other, lost between feasts and laughs and recoveries. Here it is the second day of the year. As Christmas gifts I got two calendars that show the shifting shape of the moon. I was pleased, after an early evening walk on New Year’s Day, that the moon I saw — half-moon plus swelling — matched exactly the shape on the calendar that now hangs in the kitchen. The full moon comes on Monday. Does it take the surprise out of the sky? The fragment of joy that comes with that first glimpse of toenail crescent or fat low full, at glow against the dark and shadowed sometimes by the very earth we’re walking on? We’ll see. It’s nightdark in the early sixes when I wake up and the mornings are pale. A solo star blinked out the window, the first thing I saw when I woke up today. The solo morningstar blinked in the dark, and the time and distance whispered at all the warmth and closeness of the past stretch, and whispered also of loneliness.