Cosmo’s Moon

Washington D.C. pulses with the constant flow of blood-like traffic. The streets at night, especially in the social centers, are bright and noisy, with lines of attractive young people outside the most popular clubs and bars, all shouting at friends, singing, or dodging the police. They pump the music, DJs or live bands, into the street like carbon dioxide, and it whirls in the chaos of sounds and smells. Small bistros and restaurants remain open until early morning, feeding those who no longer mean to drink, or haven't started yet, and the cheerful light from their open doorways adds to the general levity of the streets. Crowded tables litter sidewalks, cordoned for bars, open for restaurants. The scene blinks with the flashing of neon and black-light. Women, barely dressed in the brightest glitter, drag their escorts from bar to bar. Bouncers, their muscles barely squeezed into rolled-up, black T-shirts, examine identification cards and flirt indiscriminately. Policemen converse casually with suspicious men, their hands occasionally brushing a weapon. Four or five police cars remain always in view, blocking off traffic or lights whirling as they apprehend the dangerous.

Pennsylvania Avenue runs parallel, perhaps fifteen minutes away. Half an hour's drive down the Avenue one enters Maryland, and suddenly the street is bounded by fields; wildflowers in Spring, taller flowers in Summer, grasses in Autumn and Winter. The Avenue becomes the 301, and you're in the country, with ads for stables and horse trainers taped to street signs at the intersection and stuck into the grass.

Beyond the fields, trees erupt like ebullient, green walls. Turn. Turn away from the 75mph traffic and into the forest, and you'll believe again in magic. Another fifteen minutes of twists and turns brings you to the old Windsor estate, what used to be a slave plantation. Along the unpaved road you'll see the remains of an ivy-drowned tobacco shed, barely recognizable and long-since condemned, but a fascination nonetheless. A few yards further you'll pass a house, yellow warning sign, a paddock feeding seven relatively temperamental horses, and another home. I lived in that home, that farmhouse in the woods, and looking out my window one night my Aunt Constance gave a delighted exclamation, "It's Cosmo's Moon!"

The allusion, and the moon, enchanted me. I took this picture with my Digital Camera, which was the gift of that Aunt, and the thought of that moon is as warm as her hospitality.