Aug 23: Moonlight Moment

South Florida is a place of moments. Big moments sometimes. But often little moments too. This is how our part of the world feels to me. There is something unexpected about these experiences, instants that are often beautiful and on occasion almost surreal among the tropics. When they happen, and they happen to me frequently, I am startled in some way. I've shared many such moments in these blogs. The way I see it, the same kind of moments are there for any of us to discover around here. We just have to be open to them. Maybe it's stopping at a red light on A1A and noticing a beautiful girl running with a beachball toward the sea, appearing as perfect as if in some TV commercial. Or maybe it's the amber arc of an autumn cloud at sunset over the Everglades.

Or maybe it's a summertime swim when the moon takes your breath away. As always with these moments, there was nothing planned, nothing anticipated. I was just there, in the water, enjoying the twilight fade of sunlight to one side and the glow of a pale silver moon rising on the other side.

It was the kind of thing that might have happened anywhere around Greater Fort Lauderdale. In the ocean or in a pool. But on this night, at this moment, I was swimming in a pool all alone. The sky already was dramatic, the lightest of blues in a dome far overhead with clumps of heavy clouds drifting beneath. Some of these clouds floated in shades of dark blue mixed with black, others moved in tones of ivory and brown, but all of them thick and full and heavy. I watched the sun drop below the horizon as I swam a breaststroke toward the west end of the pool, then paused in the shallow water. It felt warm and relaxing. I had been there for a while now and, I decided, the time had come to leave - the sky was nearly dark. I stood up and turned for some reason, just a glance over the shoulder. And that pale silver ghost of a moon was right there, directly in my line of vision, framed in a triangle of palm fronds. It stopped me completely. For several long seconds, I stood and just looked up at this image, transfixed in another tropical moment. It was a happy coincidence, that precise placement of moon among the graceful boughs of the coconut palms. I didn't have to go out of my way to find it. Probably couldn't have if I had wanted to. In South Florida, such moments find me.