It was a full moon, and I found myself awake in the wee hours of the morning, watching it. The weather here seems stuck in September, but I know that moon-watching is a winter activity. The moonlight glitters on the snow, and we can run home, laughing, from the neighbourhood Christmas party without flashlights. It is as bright as noon at midnight, the time of the year when morning and evening are the darkest hours. Throughout my childhood it pulled me from my bed, where static electricity lit up the nightgown clinging to my legs, and I wandered silently through the house, across moonlit squares of linoleum.

And then summer comes, and the moon shrinks away in deference to the returning sun. The winter sun is a pale crackle on the horizon, a bright rip in a sky determinedly gray; the summer sun rides rampant in a dizzying circle, careening off the ridgelines and impishly peeking through sullen afternoon thunderstorms. The bay windows soak in the heat, the houseplants wither, and still the sun can scarce be persuaded to set, it bounces up again like a toddler who refuses to be put down for a nap.

The June sunset bleeds into the June sunrise, somewhere around two a.m. there was an imperceptible transition, and the birdsong is swelling again, the cool of the night is leaking away, the deep blue, the lapis lazuli, the ochre, the cerulean, the indigo, the colors even Crayola has no name for, they’re all leaching into turquoise, into mother-of-pearl, the zenith attains that perfect sky blue, and the horizon of the sky is a delicate hue found in eggshells…

I like the time in the late afternoon, when the light is leaking away and the sky is deepening into the transluscent colors of evening. I like the stained glass quality; the delicate cathedral arched above this fragile earthly city; the smudged blue shapes of the mountains ringing the horizon.

What I mean to say is, I love the sky and the light and the colors in it.

And what is to be seen in moonlight on snow? Ask Nikolai Roerich.