I love summer nights. All winter long I dream about them. I
have a few stock memories that I draw on.
When our kids were little, the boys used to sleep out in the
fort in the backyard all summer long. I'd go out back, climb up the ladder and
check on them after they'd been asleep for a while. I remember one particular very
special summer night. I'd awakened in the middle of the night to moonlight
streaming in through our bedroom window. It was brighter than I'd ever noticed
before and I was drawn to it. I slipped out of bed and down the stairs and made
my way through the not-very-dark house and out into the backyard. That night
was not even pretending to be dark. It was almost as bright as day only with a
different kind of light. It was silver light and it was reflecting off of every
surface. The lawn was silver, the flowers were silver, the trees and the
trampoline were silver. The air itself was sliver. I could see it all around me.
I could touch it. I walked across the grass, cool and silver underfoot, and began
to climb up the ladder to the fort. I glanced down at my arms. They were radiating
silver light. I was silver. Was the moonlight making my skin tingle or was the
thought of the moonlight on my skin making my skin tingle? I wanted to soak up
as much of it as I could.
I tried to wake up the boys.
"Come see," I whispered. If whispers were visible,
it would have been a wispy cloud of silver breath floating around my face.
I think one of the
boys woke up enough to stand and look out the doorway. I think he even said something about the shimmering light. But in the morning, he
didn't remember.
One summer way back when I was forty, I was training for a
marathon. In order to work my weekly long run into one busy weekend, I had to
get up and start at about 4:30 in the morning. Technically still night. Again,
it was almost as light as day. The full moon lit up the running trail as I
began at the mouth of Provo Canyon. The air was perfectly still. I listened to
the river as I ran alongside it and watched the moonlight twinkle and dance on
the surface, as if trying to dip only the very tips of its moonbeams into the icy
water. A family of raccoons crossed the trail up ahead of me, the mama stopping
briefly and turning her head to look at me, eyes glowing, then hurrying her
babies off the trail and into the bushes.
Moonlight is magical, but I also like to see the stars. The
best place to see them is up in the mountains, away from the light pollution of
our towns. Up in the mountains on a summer night, you can see billions of
stars. Some twinkling and some steady, densely
packed into an endless blue-black universe. And you can see the Milky Way. And
the constellations make so much more sense.
I remember another summer night, back when the kids were
young and before our town installed obnoxiously bright street lights. We were
all sleeping out on the trampoline. It was a relatively dark night. We were watching
for a special meteor show that was supposed to be visible that night but that
we would sleep through. We did watch the steady progress of a tiny satellite
across the sky. I like to think about us sleeping though, with silver meteors
showering down around us.
A friend of mine once told me that sometimes when she can't
sleep at night, she goes out and rides her bike around the neighborhood in her
nightgown. I'm fascinated by this. Can't you just feel what that would be like on a summer night? Finish this thought: As free as...(riding your bike around the neighborhood in your nightgown in the middle of a summer night.)
I'm waiting for the sun to go down so I can go out for a
mid-summer night's run. I've been running at night on and off for decades. I
like running at night for two reasons: in the dark, it feels like I'm going
faster than I really am, and I've had all day to warm up. Our neighborhood
block is a nearly perfect half-mile track. I've run a lot of miles around it
over the almost twenty years we've lived here. I could smell popcorn coming from
the Barretts' house most summer nights. The extra buttery kind. And the
Daltons' house always gave off a fabric softener smell. Vern Henshaw was always
out watering his front lawn at night. Did he ever water the back lawn? Barretts
have moved. Henshaws have moved, and the Daltons' kids have all grown up and Linda has retired, so she probably only
does laundry once a week now and probably during the day. But some things are
the same. You can still smell the honeysuckle over on Main Street. It smells
sweeter in the dark. The scent seems to be magnified at night, sweet and thick
in the evening air. But I miss the popcorn and the fabric softener.
I have a plan for a staged valley-wide blackout. Imagine if
at two o'clock in the morning on a specified summer night, we shut down the lights.
All the lights. All over Utah Valley. We could see the stars. Billions of them.
The same ones we see when we go up in the mountains. They're still there, I
remind myself. We just can't see very many of them.
There's a fire on a mountain across Utah Lake. It started a
couple of days ago. We can see its red glow from the front porch at night. It
starts up high and snakes its way down and across the mountainside in a wide
path. My son Joel told me today that he got up on the roof last night to watch
it.
Why didn't he get me up?
