The “blood moon”, they call it. Stumbling out of bed in the wee hours of the morning, I remembered why I had set the alarm and ran to the porch, searching for the bloody moon. Patchy clouds were drifting hurriedly across the sky, but there was no sign of the moon. My sleepy brain wondered for just a minute if it hadn’t already set, if I hadn’t overslept. The sky was dark.

But then it popped out from behind a cloud, and I felt suddenly disoriented. Something was very wrong. She hung halfway up the sky, a dull terra cotta dinner plate hanging on star-patterned wallpaper, not at all like a moon. Even nearby stars outshone her.
I could see why early man became so frightened when the moon put on her blood-red robes and tried to fade into the blackness. Groggy as I was, I could imagine that she was angry with me, ready to leave my sky forever if I didn’t shape up and start worshiping her.

But she was just joking, evidently, for about twenty minutes later,  a spark of hot light flared from the moon’s rim. The spirit of the Sun began to slowly march across the disc of the moon, chasing away all the evil demons and restoring the world. Or so it seemed.
I crawled back into the warm bed and dreamed of gods and goddesses and times of old.

Partial Eclipse from February 2008 Read more