The moon is low this June, not riding high in fullness like some other months, maybe other Junes. Most of the night is in shadow and not in silvery brightness. Still it is illuminated. The river is running so full it is smooth in the slough. If not for a rare ripple or cloop!-sound one would not first perceive it as water. All around are full trees and high grasses. They silhouette one another until the last layer is standing against the deep blue sky with only a few of the brighter stars behind able to out-glimmer the moon. She glows there, behind the trees, teasing, first hiding then revealing the scape of thickety growing things along the river's edge. The air cools and the moisture in it feels welcome to the skin.
The day was hot and bright with little cloud to offer any relief. We seem to have arrived at summer's gate to find that shining season all ready for us--the heat, the fast-growing trees, the deep grass, the scent of flowers more familiar in July than in June but there they are--roses enough to make the canes reach over to the ground, sweet peas climbing up every fence, wild melilot, Russian olive blossoms (Wyoming jasmine, some call that), viola tricolor, even some lilacs still and irises by the square yard. The softest breeze brings twenty-five smells, all in agreement, all of them pleasant, to my nose--I don't have to waste a joule of energy to go to them. The toothy triangles of cottonwood leaves swing and shine, swing and shine, reflecting the sun like a million mirrors while brushing against each other in a whisper. As he sank in the northwest, the sun gave up a color of the visible spectrum one at a time--embers of yellow, orange, red and purple lingered as if the horizon were a firepit around which the green hills gathered.
In the car coming home Dopplerized cricket song came towards me and faded as I passed, and now in the deep dusk, I can count eight crickets, three toads and several pools of chorus frogs all going about the business for which June seems to have been created. There is a brown thrasher in a thicket up the river, and as a heron glides overhead, her moon-made shadow sweeping along obliquely under her, she offers her craek! to the sounds of a living night. If there were a heaven, I would wish my place in it to remain June, and for my food to be the scent of flowers and running water, and my drink to be the shimmer of the moon on the turning leaves of the cottonwoods. I would wish the choir to be thrashers and crickets and even a harsh heron here and there, and for this moon to be my nightlight. I would wish, in that heaven, for June to last forever.