In Which the Moon and I Take a Beach Holiday

You know where the evening found me. It found me sitting on that top front porch step again, watching the winter moon. :-)

I have to admit that I truly enjoy the Pennsylvania winters. Not the driving-in-bad-weather part, of course. But the sparkle of snow. The gorgeous, crisp sunrises. And the cold moonrise. I find much to love about our winters. With my face turned into the biting-cold breeze, I feel invigorated; I know that I am truly alive.

My husband is originally from the Johnstown area, but he got his undergrad college degree in Gainesville, Florida. (Which makes us a Lion-Gator household, from a college football perspective, me being a Nittany Lion and all.)

For the first 10 to 15 years that we dated, we went to Florida nearly every winter for a week to 10 days. I get a nice, long holiday break over Christmas at the university where I work, and we would often extend it a bit, leaving a day or two after Christmas (after all of the family visits) for much warmer and sunnier climes.

Some of my favorite beaches and swimming spots in the world are in northern Florida. Little Talbot and Big Talbot Island and Amelia Island on the eastern shores. St. George Island and St. Joseph's Peninsula on the panhandle. The lakes and pine trails of north central Florida's Ocala National Forest: Buck Lake and Gold Head. The crystal clear springs, where you can swim to your heart's content and see all manner of creatures, and in which (in some places) you can swim with manatees. Alexander Springs, Blue Spring, Peacock Spring, Homosassa Springs, Wakulla Springs (where the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon was filmed).

I speak these names out loud, these places that I love, and the words feel like poetry on my lips. And I sigh. And I remember wistfully the handful of times I have watched the full blood-red moon rise over the ocean . . .

We haven't been back to Florida since the late 1990s. You know how it goes in life. You do the same thing for years. Then, suddenly, you stop. And it's not even like you decided it would stop, it just does. And you only know it after the fact. You can point to it and say: Oh, that, that was our last trip.

I can identify one of the end markers: My beloved big orange cat, Gremlin, was diagnosed with diabetes in 1998. To live, he needed two insulin shots per day, and nobody could touch him to give him his shots except my husband (boyfriend at the time) and myself. The choice was either to take him along wherever we went, or to stop going. We compromised. We started taking shorter vacations, closer to home; we borrowed a conversion van; we took the cat along. But we never got back to Florida, even after Gremlin passed on.

Why not? I don't know. The drive (12 to 15 hours from central PA to north Florida), which we took on lightheartedly as young people, now seemed daunting. Living out of a car and sleeping in tents on the ground for 7 to 10 nights in a row seemed somewhat less appealing than it had before. My role at work had changed, my responsibilities had grown, and being away from all of that for an extended period of time seemed less possible or advisable.

And just as the cat was living out his final days, I bought a house. With this new level of responsibility, to be away from it for any extended period of time seemed risky. Especially when, in my first winter of home ownership, we had a terrible ice storm during the first week of January; it brought about a hundred trees down on my house, and I was in the house alone when they fell, lying like a stick in my bed, praying for the safety of the house and for myself, hearing each tree fall (first the crack, loud, like a "boom!" from a cannon), feeling the impact on the house, about one new tree falling every 15 minutes, all night long. (No, I'm not exaggerating.)

The thought of what might have happened, had we not been home to deal with that crisis, sent us into fits. Will we ever leave our home in winter for a vacation after that experience? I don't know. We haven't yet.

And so now, in winter, we do not go to Florida. We do not walk the sandy pine trails of north Florida. We do not swim in its crystal clear springs. We do not stroll the white sandy shores at St. Joseph's Peninsula, picking up dozens of tiny, dime-sized, perfectly made sand dollars and stowing them in our pockets, in our daysacks, in our shoes, which we carry as we walk barefoot on the beach.

And so, for some reason - maybe it's the time of year - amid my moon daydreaming, I was thinking about Florida, and how much I missed the beach. Maybe I was wishing for a Florida vacation.

And then, I restored my self to my present time and place, and I watched the moon. It rose through the tippy-tops of the treetops, and as it did so, the branches reached up, and they tickled the moon. And I thought, along the edges of my imagination, that maybe I heard the moon laugh a tiny, silvery laugh. And then it rose higher, just above the treetops, through the clouds, and I got a glimpse of what the moon might look like at the beach.

And I thought to myself: Moonrise over the ocean. (As viewed from cold and snowbound central Pennsylvania, of course.) And my heart smiled deeply.

So please enjoy this glimpse of moonrise over the ocean. But be careful; don't crush the dune grasses. Me? I'll be over here walking barefoot on the white sandy beach, collecting tiny, dime-sized, perfectly shaped sand dollars and stowing them in my boots . . .

The soundtrack: the Go-Go's, Vacation.

P.S. I don't usually do this, but I have come across some fantastic photo work that I admire and I can't resist including a link. The woman is from Russia, and her photographs are of her children and their various creatures around their farm. The photographer's name is Elena Shumilova, and I think you may enjoy a look at her pictures. More pictures: here. (If these links don't work for you, simply google her name, and her pictures will probably come up.) I am astonished at the quality of her work, especially for someone who, as the article says, got her first camera in 2012.

I noted that there were lots of comments at the bottom of the page, and I read just a few. One that touched me as being simple yet profound was this: "It's an ordinary life in Russian villages. But high quality of camera, deep understanding of beautiful - and you see what you see . . . Take pleasure."

I like that. Ordinary life, with a deep understanding of beautiful. You see what you see. Take pleasure . . .