This evening, as I was standing along NE 15th Ave, waiting for the bus to come, I smiled a little bit to myself.
It was cold out. Not a cold where you can breathe out and pretend you're smoking, not a cold that makes the nipples stand out, but that pleasent, cool. The kind where you don't want to stand on the porch, but going for a walk would be just fine.
It's been a long winter here in Oregon. We get a lot of cloud cover. While I love the grey, overcast days, there's something really special when the clouds go away, and you can look up.
I grew up in Texas. I still have fond memories of the house I grew up in, just outside the city limits, where I could run out at night into an acre field behind the house and look up for miles, and see the fish-bowl-sized horizon in every direction, with the city lights off in one direction, and assurances that that dim glow over there was another city miles away.
The stars in Texas are big, and huge, and bright, and much, much better than the stars anywhere else. Especially when you're a kid. There were so many of them! I never could find any constellations, even if I had a map. I never looked very hard, I was too busy just being amazed. As far as I can remember, there were no winters in Texas. It was always a nice 70 degrees at night, with a sweet warm breeze and crickets chirping well into the night.
Tonight, at the bus stop, in the middle of the city, there we no clouds. It was cold, and crisp, and there are trees everywhere. I looked up, through the tree branches and saw an almost-full moon, and a single star -- Venus, I think, not even a star -- and for all I can remember, for a few seconds, I was standing in that acre field, in the middle of a warm summer night, thinking to myself, "Wow, it's so far away, and I'm so small, but yet, somehow, nature has conspired to let me watch it twinkle, for just a few moments." I believe a cricket even chirped in agreement.