When I turned down Gribble Road this morning — the final leg of my drive to work — I was struck by an oddness about the scene before me. Something seemed...unsusual. But what?

I slowed the car to ponder my surroundings.

The sky was dark. A layer of clouds obscured the pale light of dawn that I knew must be creeping over the hills behind me. For at least a few minutes more, night held sway. Drizzle hung in the air, creating a sort of veiled and gauzy mist which shimmered in the moonlight.

That was it: the moonlight.

Sometimes when it rains, the clouds will part in a particular section of the sky, revealing the blazing sun. "Sunshowers" some people call this, or "the devil is beating his wife".

I was experiencing moonshowers. The moon, just past full, hung low in the west. In every other quarter the sky was filled with clouds.

Here and there, low banks of patchwork fog clung to the ground: at the edge of the woods, by the big red barn, near the creek. The muddy fields lay black and lumpish all around, crumbled furrows vaguely defined by the moonlight. The road itself seemed to glow grey-black. The moon was a pale eye gazing at a dim and faded land.

The night — for it felt like night and not at all like dawn — possessed an altogether ethereal quality, the likes of which I've never seen in precisely those conditions: cool and moist and shimmering. The nearest I've seen is that rare and beautiful sight: a thin layer of snow bright beneath a full moon, the landscape a dull metallic silver, as if all were a dream.

The world this morning was dreamlike, at least for those ninety seconds on Gribble Road.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — Red Right Ankle   Kris and I watch Life as a House, and I like it in spite of myself. I am swamped with computer work. I'm getting thinner and I've lost my belt, so my pants keep falling down. I *love* the song Red Right Ankle by The Decemberists.

2003 — Holding Pattern   Nothing much to say.

2002 — Eila's 32nd Birthday   We sat around a table, drinking our cosmopolitans and our Mexican coffees, and we played UNO while pumping dollar bills into the jukebox.