It's a Marvelous Night for a &*^%&* Moondance

It is 3am. I am lying in a crumpled heap on the concrete pad in front of our garage door. My palms burn. I can feel blood dripping down my left knee, absorbed by the shredded remains of my pajama pants and terry cloth robe.

It was really only a matter of time.

There are three sets of stairs into/out of my house. One inside and a choice of two to get to the driveway.

Five carpeted stairs from the main floor to the landing...where my heels got caught, bilaterally, in some invisible fiber sending me careening onto the carpet at my husbands feet while he stood watching in amazement. If he hadn't had the oak door open I would have died.

Six concrete stone stairs making a winding pathway through the ivy under the big pine tree lead to the driveway...where I slid on an invisible patch of ice, pitching into the air in the manner of Tara Lapinski, landing on my butt. It took an hour before the vibration up my spinal column turned to actual pain.

And finally the five traditional concrete steps to the concrete pad by the garage door.

You would think this would have been the safest way down the steps at 3am.

I mean really. In math terms I had a 1:3 chance right?

Why was I walking down the steps at 3am in my now ruined pajama pants and blood soaked terry cloth robe?

I wanted to see the Blood Moon.

The night, here on the Coast of Illinois was cold, crisp, clear. The moon was fabulous. Big and round and moon-like. A shimmery deep pink. To the lower right a bright twinkle, Venus, I believe. One more brightly twinkling star a little further to the right.

Mystical.

Awe-inspiring.

I would have taken a picture but my iPod was not spared injury,receiving cosmetic damage to its face. And although the iPod still works, the moon being eight gazillion-paradigm miles away, is really too far for my tiny iPod camera.

If you are interested it looked just like my scraped up left knee.

I would have posted a picture of that but there is just too much sensationalism in journalism today.

Crossing that line would be a slippery slope.

Like the stairs.