This sky is the color "midnight blue" from a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons with sharpener, and it's as featureless as the surface of that wax stylus when it was brand-new, shiny-smooth, as yet unmarked by fingernails or other crayons, still sharp and unbroken in its pristine wrapper with the neatly lettered, mysterious name. I wasn't allowed to stay up until midnight, of course, but this crayon, with its honest childhood smell, promised to show me what it would look like if I could see the sky at that late hour.
It isn't midnight now; it's barely dark, and the moon is just beginning its climb from the horizon into that smooth, flat, midnight blue sky. The moon is pale buttercream yellow tonight, but it isn't soft-edged like a frosted cupcake. Instead it is as sharply round as the circles an art teacher cuts from construction paper, circles I try in vain to copy with compass and tracing patterns and round-tipped scissors. The moon's edges are so sharp, in fact, that the sky looks as if some gigantic teacher has cut one of her perfect circles from it, and I can see through the dark into a world of light beyond, a world where beautiful and warm and welcoming people are smiling and waiting to meet me, shining a light to show me the way in.
I think if I can get there, they won't even mind that my circles are a little pointy.
I could read you all day. When I see the sharp moon, I think of the great nature photography in National Geographic with the important stuff precisely in focus and the rest lost in the frost of the background. (Real life doesn't actually go out of focus in the background, but that's a nice aspect of photography.) In the sky tonight, however, both moon and the backing sky are in sharp focus because both are "the important stuff." Yes, the midnight blue is smooth, but it is also crystal clear. You feel that if you were to step into it, you might never touch bottom. Thanks for the memories of the crayons (with the smell) and of sharing the night.
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