Romantic and enchanting, the pale green-gold globe has inspired lovers and poets since the beginning of time. It somehow affects everything large and small. Even the great Atlantic and Pacific, captivated by its mysterious, unseen gravity force, swell and surge higher to the shore.
Some, however, are uneasy about the moon, especially the one that is full. In fact, there was a time when the full moon was indeed quite unwelcome to many. It was also time when it was terrifying to some...and it wasn't that long ago.
Every 27 days 7 hours 43 minutes and 11.5 seconds the moon is further from the sun than is the earth. Its face completely illuminated by the sun, although only reflecting about 7 per cent of the sun's light, can be bright enough here on earth to light our way along a forest trail at midnight.
It's really one of life's great little treasures, and it's free. A walk in the woods under the full moon in the balmy summer when the woods smells of green, dewy-wet grass can be a soulfully calming experience.
And the sounds...
The lonely, deep silence of the moon enhances exquisitely the soft autumn sounds of Nature. Your ears seem to focus naturally on the crisp wrinkling noise of foot steps on the cold-stiffened oak leaves that have fallen on the forest floor.
The crunch of frosty boots breaking crusty snow in January is both at once a sharp and a delicate sound. And with pearly-slick blood-red fangs glistening bright with moonlight, the soft baying howl of the lone werewolf...
Wait a minute, Werewolf? Where?
Once part of common culture and now of distant folklore, werewolves lived among us largely unnoticed as most humans usually do. That is, they looked and acted just like the rest of us for the first 26 days of each lunar cycle.
It was the 27th day that caused concern. For then, and only then, according to legend, would the man (or woman) so afflicted with "lycanthropy" (the name for the condition of being a werewolf) transform into a hairy, snarling, fanged wolf-like apparition, a ferocious and cunning beast bent upon horrible murder, mostly of peasants, I presume.
All that was once thought to be almost true, a scary superstition, perhaps believed by some but not most of us. Then came America's Last King, and we were all wrong to doubt.
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