A SHORT MEMOIR
 
 
back to main WRITINGS page My brother-in-law, Pauly, walked out the front door, gasped “Oh my God!” then called through the screen door asking me to come outside. He pointed to the full moon as it hung just above the low southeast mountains, its yellow and orange glow mixing with the early evening’s violet. A few small clouds were gathered around it as if paying homage to a perfect and bright being. A birch tree’s angular branches, each with only a few leaves desperately clinging to them against the Autumn cold, formed the right side of a frame that Nature had put there for us alone. Only a few stars had managed to open their eyes. A good friend once told me that a moon such as this – lying low and looking twice as large as it shines though the horizon’s thick atmosphere – is called a Carolina Moon, though I had learned it was called a Harvest Moon. Either way, it’s beautiful. I got Lacee, my oldest daughter, to come outside to look. I called Jasmine, my youngest daughter, in Washington DC and asked her to go outside early tomorrow evening and look. My wife, Rosemary, came home a few minutes later and while holding hands we looked at that Moon – Harvest or Carolina – for a few minutes in silence. When I came back inside, I took some time to think about that big round Moon, about Nature’s angular frames, about leaves struggling to survive the cold Autumn. I thought about my brother-in-law’s willingness to see beauty, about Lacee’s joie de vivre, about Jasmine’s pure heart. I thought about things large and great, about silence and surviving, about brightness and perfection. I thought about holding hands. back to main WRITINGS page back to SITE MAP back to SITE MAP HOLDING HANDS by DWIGHT BERNARD MIKKELSEN copyright © 1998 NotesLinger Arts