February 27 2004, 08:49 PM This Clean Expanse

So I sit, out here under the stars with my magic recording device becoming ever more rapidly chill, my fingers complaining about the lack of gloves, the wind, the lack of gloves. It is a beautiful night.

We are out away from the urban pool again. I do not know if it is due to the absence of the thick embrace of the city's heat, or just because there was more of it, but there is still a fair amount of snow up here. It is most apparent in the places of shade: one can mark the sun's passage with it. It is white up here, a clearness unkissed by exhaust fumes or sand or salt. In places, yes, flecked with the dinge of old leaves or guilty of where the dogs go, but these are aberrations. For fields and unbroken fields worth, it is a untrampled sun bone white. The cliffs give up water in great frozen gouts, limning ghosts.

It is cold, cold enough to clear the sky all the way up. The moon hangs high, half full and all bright. Orion swings through, proud, trophy held high. When I first came out, I could see few stars, but now the street lights have been blown, and I see more. If I remain out here long enough, the Milky Way may attend from behind that damn moon and wave hello. Plenty cold enough for that.

The guests have gone and the dogs are now still, and outside the silence settles over everything. In the far distance across the valley in the summer one can hear the cows low after evening, but I do not hear them now. There is the smell of good hardwoods burning in the air. Dim lights spill from our porch, another porch. The night is tired and has settled in, like it never can under the sodium lamps and sirens of the city in these times. Down the hill over the fallow and into the treed valley lurks a shadow black, an ink too deep to associate with modern life. Men would come to erect bright yellow lights and a parking lot to chase it from there and secure the area. I want none of these things tonight.

Ah! There we are.