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Show ::Ki Mamnnttamim Once in a blue moon Bats were swirling and diving above the lightning rods and the wind was kicking up a dervish of dust on the land as we waited for the blue moon. It was getting late. The silhouettes of the cattle on the hill had long since faded from sight but the wind was warm and the stars glimmered from horizon to horizon. Normally I would have been indoors at that hour, but a blue moon, I had been told, was a once-in-a-decade event and shouldn't be missed. I nodded and went home to stand watch. Although, to be truthful I wasn't entirely sure what I was watching for. I walked out into the pasture, sat down on an overturned bucket of oats, pulled a few burrs out of Misty's mane and tried to remember what a blue moon was. The sky was still midnight blue over Hoyt's Peak where we expected this apparition to first appear. An occasional headlight dipped in and out of the trees on the dirt road to the town water tank, but otherwise the mountain was a wall of darkness. Misty swished her tail at a bothersome fly and ambled over to give the oat bucket a nudge. She roused me out of reverie of vampires, goblins and trolls and we walked together over to the water trough. The pump was gurgling quietly and the fox grass rustled in the wind. Down the road a neighbor's wind chime played an eerie melody. Finally a halo of moonlight began to glow behind the mountain. At first it was pale blue and I thought I had II discovered the answer to our mystery. But as the full II moon finally rose above the ridgeline it didn't look any U different from the full moons we had skied beneath in January or camped under in June. It was lovely, make no mistake about that. But it was not blue. After departing from the uppermost branches of the ponderosa pines on the ridge, the moon floated up above the valley. Its brightness drowned out the nearby constellations and sent a chill up my spine. Now I could see the bats quite clearly and I sensed a presence in the shadow of the old cottonwood tree behind the house. The prowler however turned out to be my old slow-moving dog and a suspicious rustle turned out to be nothing more than forgotten , laundry flapping on the line. Nevertheless, I retreated to the safety of our livingroom to do a little research on the origin of the blue moon. "A very long time," was all the dictionary could offer. The atlas was no more helpful but the Farmers Almanac had the answer. Anytime a full moou occurs twice in one month the second is called a blue moon. And since this occurence is a rarity, once in a blue moon has also come to be a colloquialism for something that only happens once in a great while. And come to think of it a warm gentle snowless summer, such as the one we have been enjoying now since April only comes along once in a blue moon. |