I finally got my porch light fixed. It took ten minutes, if that. A man named Max came over and twisted off one of the screws that held the burnt out bulb in place, pulled a fresh one from a cardboard sleeve and bing!

Illumination.

I have been talking about getting maintenance over here to do this very simple thing for months now. For over six months. During those six months, I stumbled around after dark on the porch, watering plants, collecting laundry, and thinking how nice it would be to set out here at my card table with a cup of tea and my laptop and do some writing.

This is what I am doing right now. I am sitting here, sipping tea and blissfully typing away in a garden irradiated by soft globe lighting. My plants are sprouting around me. My little dog is staring up at me, bringing me his tennis ball, and settling in beside the basil for a snooze. And I am watching him, the basil, the tendrils of the nocturnally blooming jasmine plant that climbs the plaster beside this writing table. I am watching life as it stretches into being all around me and I am thinking how grateful I am and then, how nice it feels to be grateful.

Tonight, after I tucked Ham in and turned off all the barn lights, I looked into the sky and saw the moon again. She’s just a sliver in the darkness. A waxing crescent. But close to us, so close that I can trace lines around the shadow of her fullness, the roundness she’ll grow into. The stars are out too, farther away and spaced at a distance, making this moon appear singular in the sky.

It’s been over a week since she last showed her face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when the moon disappears, things get weird. I never know exactly how, all I can say is that I settle into a subtle funk. Begin to sense, like a sneaking suspicion, an obscuration of an otherwise balanced bond with myself. It’s like, without the moon to hold me down, to light my way, I’m perpetually fumbling around at eleven p.m. on a lightless porch, looking for my laundry without any real clue as to where it’s hanging or what I’m dropping when I try to gather it up.

And yet, for all the funkiness the moon affects, she never looks uncomfortable up there, in her solitude, in the darkness. She is perpetually poised, never in need, ever self suspended.

I’m partial to this sort of space myself. At times, I’ve opted for it entirely. In doing so I have sometimes forgotten that I am not the moon. I have sometimes passed whole years trying to hold myself up without help. I have flailed, floundered, fallen down and found myself. And it’s been good that way. It’s been nice and navy blue. I must say, though, a little light, a little moonshine, never hurt anybody.