Supermoon

Like the majority of my fellow American citizens, I’ve been extremely depressed this week. The election has made me sick…literally sick. I watched the results in shock with my in-laws in Charleston, South Carolina and by Wednesday night I had fallen ill. I don’t get sick very often, but in times of great stress I guess my immune system weakens. Last weekend I actually thought that on the day after the election I’d at least have one LESS thing to worry about. How wrong I was.

I always get depressed when I’m sick because I HATE lazing around the house doing nothing, especially when the weather is nice. Home in California now, the weather has been simply beautiful and I wanted nothing more than to go to Point Reyes in search of burrowing owls and other creatures today. I haven’t been to a park in so long and I just NEED it right now. But I woke up this morning feeling even worse and I knew Point Reyes would be a bad idea. I was then a little uplifted to discover that the u-pick tomatoes I wanted to do were (amazingly, to me) still available so I entertained the notion of driving to Brentwood to pick a couple of cases of tomatoes in order to make tomato soup using my new pressure canner, which I really wanted to do a couple of weekends ago but couldn’t due to uncertainty about my travel plans, and I assumed I’d missed my chance this year. But then I decided I felt too bad to even pick tomatoes. So instead I felt sorry for myself and took a nap. When I woke up I decided to go grocery shopping as we have no fresh food in the house, having been gone for a week. I felt somewhat uplifted getting out of the house and enjoying the gorgeous weather, until I had an embarrassing coughing fit in the grocery store. Driving home at the beginning of dusk, though, I caught a glimpse of tonight’s supermoon – it’s the closest it’s been to Earth since 1948 – as it had just crested over the East Bay hills that on my drive out I had noted were just beginning to turn green, surrounded by wispy pink clouds illuminated by the setting sun. It was absolutely stunning. A couple of cars had pulled over to take a picture of it, which I considered doing, but I knew my cell phone would never capture it correctly. I was five minutes from home and I knew that if I raced home and grabbed my camera, I’d miss it, but I did it anyway. I pulled into the garage, ran into the house, grabbed my DSLR, startled Mark, and raced back out to the location of the perfect picture. I had missed it, though. The moon had risen quite a bit and although the sunset over the bay across from the moon was still quite bright and spectacular, it was no longer illuminating the sky around the moon, so gone were the pretty pink clouds around the moon. It was also quite dark in the direction of the moon. I snapped a few pictures since I was there, but these are NOT the spectacular sight I saw coming home from the grocery store. I do feel fortunate, though, that although I consider today a depressing waste of a day (and I HATE wasting days), at least I managed to time the one thing I did today so I could enjoy the sight of the huge moon just beginning to rise over the hills for a minute or two as I drove along. I don’t know that it makes me feel any better about the world, but I’m glad for that one minute of beauty and peace today.