now I understand on better terms since Burmingham

I'm home for the weekend. Last night I couldn't sleep in sort of the old fashioned sense--I tossed and turned and thought sad, furtive thoughts. At some point, I got up and looked out the window of my old room where I'm staying. The trees were all swallowed up in mist and darkness, but even sunk under so much cloudcover, the full moon gave everything an eerie blue cast. I don't have a picture, so I'm writing it here. When I was imagining this lunation in my mind days earlier, I thought it would be bright and shining, sort of absorbing negativity. It's in Taurus--a comfortable moon. Astrology is total bunk except when it's something bad or hurtful. I think I always sleep poorly on a full moon because of the extra light.

My dad told me this story this weekend about when he was about 8 or so. He was living on his grandmother's farm in Michigan. His father and uncle had gone off to war, and his grandfather had just died in an automobile accident, so it was him and his brothers and sisters and cousins all living under one big roof with both their mothers working to make ends meet in his grandmother's restaurant. One day, my dad's grandmother gave him a BB gun to drive off the rabbits that were getting into the garden. Being a little boy, he immediately wanted to hunt everything. He knew this place where this gigantic horned owl roosted, and so he got it in his mind that he would go and shoot the thing.

 He found the place, and the owl, which flew down very obligingly and let him creep up on it. He got very close--closer than he'd ever been to an owl. But right when he was about to shoot it, it flew off about a hundred yards deeper into the forest. He followed. It flew off again, and seemed to wait for him on a rotting stump. It went on like this--the owl "leading" him deeper and deeper into a frozen swamp in the middle of nowhere in small town Michigan. He realized soon he was miles from home and lost.

It seemed like the build-up for some backwoods fairytale, or a parable, but my dad just ended the story saying he didn't end up ever shooting the owl, and by the time he found his way home, it was long after dark, and he had frostbite starting on his toes. Maybe just a story of hunting for a Hunter's moon, but my mind keeps returning to it.