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I inexplicably awake a few minutes before three a.m., and step outside. It’s as still as a stage during the night between performances. Entangled among the fir trees, the moon — near full in a clear sky — shines, an alabaster globe, casting a light among the branches that falls upon the ground in great sheets of lace.

I stand, small and quiet, bathed in the alabaster light, until I, too, become an alabaster being. A tableau of beauty apart from the ordinary, the clever moon possesses the night. She is a lesser god, creating silhouette vignettes from borrowed light, as if the very echo of “let there be light” is captured by her, so she too might create a world, in bas relief and black and white.

Rapt in a silken night, I listen to a tiny screech owl in a nearby tree, and another, several trees distant, replying.

Then I hear another sound, like a soft and gentle dog’s bark — as if a dog were dreaming this exact same pristine scene. But the sound comes from overhead. The intermittent bird call moves off to the north, then comes another. Then a third and a fourth, the quiet calls emerge from just below the tree line. They — whatever sort of bird they are — are spaced about a hundred feet apart, gently barking to one another in the deep well of night, companionably together, even with the distance between them. They sail the night sky, bathed in moonlight, nocturnally trekking. I imagine them settling, finally, to sleep in trees or upon a lake before the sunrise.

“Take me with you,” my heart calls out. Instead, the glorious night falls into complete and utter silence. I turn and go back to my own bed, not so far distant, and curl up with the cat.