Just Some Critter

Oddly Orange Waxing Gibbous Moon (extended exposure) – Photo: L. Weikel

I’m sitting here on my couch, laptop at the ready. Our thick wooden front door is open, leaving only a screen between the elements and me. Curiously, at least at this very moment, the only sound I hear is the intermittent buzz of a single insect. It’s not even a cricket. Just some critter hanging around the hostas or maybe sitting on a leaf or nestled in a crevice of our shagbark hickory.

Perhaps I’m noticing that the only sound is this single random buzzer because I was just outside trying to capture the eerie creamsicle-colored beauty of the waxing gibbous moon. I definitely wasn’t planning on writing about the moon tonight. In fact, I was pretty sure I was going to share photos of a hawk that screeched at us relentlessly for a good ten minutes on our walk last night.

But as I was getting the photos in order, my eye caught sight of something bright and colorful peering in at me through the living room window. At first I assumed it was a lightning bug. It’s kind of weird how often I see a lightning bug at the very same spot, blinking at me as it clings to the screen. It can’t be the same bug, either – I see one in the same spot year after year. I can’t explain it.

But it wasn’t a lightning bug. It was the moon – and a noticeably orange one at that.

Can’t Capture It

I’m sorry to say that no matter how hard I tried, I failed to capture both the rich pumpkin hue and the surprisingly large appearance of her this evening. It was the color that was most surprising, though. It’s startling to see so much orange when she’s so high in the sky.

While I was standing outside on the lawn in the dark, fiddling with my iPhone, I was at first serenaded by an army of bullfrogs. (Yes, that’s the technical name for a bunch of frogs.) Their voices were impressive – and in the blackness of the night, it was easy to imagine them each weighing a good 35 pounds or so.

But then, right while I was attempting to photograph the moon, my most treasured neighbors called out to me. All of a sudden the three donkeys that now graze on the hill behind our barn let loose with their otherworldly sand people (a la Star Wars) sounding voices. (Click the links – the donkeys really do sound like that.) I struggle to express how much joy their noisy, bizarre, cacophonic iterations bring me.

And of course by the time I switched to a mode in which I could record them all three of them abruptly went mute. I swear they were messing with me.

Weird – at this very moment, even the scritchy noise of the bug that’s not a cricket has stopped. Only silence so profound that I can hear faint ringing in my ears prevails.