La Luna
I am sitting on my wooden fire-escape deck in 2017 looking East watching the sunset shine againt some distant clouds. I am on the third floor of an aging walk up in a neighborhood full of two-flats and single family homes. It is summertime. I feel a warm breeze across my body. I watch the neighbor's maple tree while it sways with the same wind I am feeling. I hear the sound the tree makes as the wind ripples through it. It sounds like a wave breaking against a beach. The neighborhood birds are singing their last songs before the dim of night quiets them. I can hear the distant hum of the nearby expressway behind the noise of rippling leaves and branches. An icecube in my drink cracks.
I look to my right - South now - across the roof of my neighbor's house to watch the other neighborhood trees. There is something on their roof. I can see its silhouette against the swaying trees further down the block. There is a cat on the roof. I recognize the cat. It is my downstairs neighbor's cat Luna. How did she get over there? She must have jumped from the second floor of the deck across the gangway and onto the rooftop.
My downstairs neighbor's screen door opens. I see light through the deck boards beneath me. A woman speaks Spanish. I hear the cat's name being called. I watch the cat stand up and casually walk down the sloping roof to the eave and make a leap towards home.
I've been thinking a lot about my old apartment lately. It wasn't a perfect place. It had a lot of old building problems, and a similar amount of bad landlord problems. But it did have a fire-escape deck (a Chicago staple) with a view. I think that is why I stayed there for so long. I stayed there for ten years. I could watch the sunrise if I bothered to get up early enough. In the evening I'd sometimes catch a view like the one in the picture above. If the evening or the night was clear enough I could see the moon for a while before it swung out of view. It was real nice to look at.
It's funny how memory works though isn't it? You can live an experience of looking out off a deck at the sunset over and over for years and they still get filed away in your memory away from your immediate concerns until something jostles you into recalling them. Each time this happens you rember things a little differently than before. This time I remembered when I saw the downstairs neighbor's cat on the roof next door. Luna is Spanish for moon.
While I write this there are four astronauts flying throuh space at almost 1800 mph on their way back to earth after taking a trip around the dark side of the moon. Maybe that is what jostled the memories of my old apartment loose. The astronauts are members of the Artemis II mission. This is the first NASA moon mission I've seen in my lifetime and naturally I've been following coverage of the mission as the crew gets through the major mission stages. Recently they lost contact with earth for something like 40 minutes while their ship went around the dark side of the moon. I can only imagine what that felt like. They have taken some incredible photos during their trip. This one is what they call an "earthset" - taken before the earth drops out of view as the spacecraft does its flyby. NASA has a page with a lot more images from the mission here.
It's been an amazing thing to watch.
The astronauts are supposed to splash down this Friday on April 10th. I'll be watching.
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