Reflected Presence

When I walked out of the house this morning I looked to the southwest as usual, just to see the usual absence in the sky of the towers that once stood there, a mile and a half away.

After five years, it’s a habit I can’t seem to break myself of, that hopeful wishful looking—as if somehow, some night, in the silent dark, they will have come back to us again and be standing monolithic once more in the morning sky, as if they had never left.

They never have and never will, of course, but it doesn’t stop me looking.

But this morning I had an amazing, a wondrous surprise. Hanging in the empty sky above the empty place was the waning moon, huge and white, beautiful and sorrowful. A gibbous moon, fading from the bottom edge, that looked down like a loving face, tenderly inclined to where the towers and the people had been, sheltering, grieving, honoring.

I can’t say it made me happy, exactly. On this day nothing could do that. (Except the head of Osama bin Laden, turbaned in bacon and stuck on a pike.) But it did, somehow, make me for a moment a little bit less sad.