Lambency

The last bus drops me off at the road end in full moon: a hunter's moon. The air is crisp and clear; the temperature very low.

Snow poles are out all along the roadside, though there's no need of them tonight.

The sky is clear too; nothing but the moon and a few stars: the Plough, Venus. It's not hard to imagine the blue light to the north is the aurora borealis, what's called here fox fire. The story goes that an arctic fox was running in the far north, brushing his fur on the mountains as he passed, causing sparks to fly up into the sky, becoming the northern lights.

Foxfire is also the bioluminescence of some species of fungi that enjoy decaying wood, like the Armillaria species: honey mushrooms - also good to eat, but I've seen none here along by the woodland.

Aside from the moon, there's a small fire of brushwood and brash left over from recent fellings way out in a pale newly ploughed field. The moon illuminates its smoke.

Moonlight lifts the long white plastic bale lines of silage waiting to be brought home so that they appear floating, luminous above their shadows.
My shadow walks companionably beside me, merging with the shadows of roadside trees, but always emerging again and stepping to my steps.

Shadows are fewer where the trees are thin; the moon strikes right to the woodland floor in pale shafts, dappling the fresh frosted leaves, sparking a hundred lights. A fallen aurora.

Just before the dark woodland - pine and oak and birch, alder and spruce - a slender shadow of a tall thin birch is cast all along the whole lit length of an old oak-bole's crinkled skin. That too merges with my own shadow as I pass.

It's so seldom that I walk at night, I'd like to prolong this short walk - half an hour is not long enough; and though there's plenty of white on the white page to write these words, zero degrees mean it's too cold to linger.

I breathe a last plume at the night sky; my shadow does the same, then I move inside the old farmhand's cottage; but I move around inside by moonlight, stepping where moon fingers the wooden floors.

Light's not just what strikes into the eye. It's what a fox delivers, a mushroom on dying wood; it's ciphered in the whorl and mottled grain of wide old oak floorplanks. Shadow is nothing but the far side of what we see.