There is so much I wanted to write about today, but now that I finally have the time, I find myself not up to the task. It has been a long day of continued recovery from the evil cold that is sweeping the nation and nursing AJ and my husband, who have now both succumbed.

I do, however, wish to park a quote here so I can find it later. I�ve been dipping in and out of Henry Beston�s The Outermost House and am now, unfortunately, finished with it. It�s a lovely piece of writing. Beston wrote it in the 1920s after spending a year living in a cabin at the end of Cape Cod. It�s old fashioned in all the best ways, and definitely in the Walden camp.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. By day, space is one with the earth and with man � it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more. When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and our world islanded in its stream of stars � pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience.

I suspect night on Cape Cod in 1926 was a very different thing than night for most of us today. I know from my summers spent on the Cape (and from one adventure skinny dipping at the beach when we could not find our clothes when we got out, not knowing, in the dark of night, that we�d washed some 50 feet down the beach). But even in well-lit urban centers, where you are unlikely to feel �islanded in [our world�s] stream of stars,� we are different people after dark.

My mother once told me that the reason she hated living in the Midwest was that there was nothing bigger than man and his creation � no mountains, no oceans, nothing to make man realize how small he really is. I think she has a point, in that it is dangerous for us to think we�re the biggest and most powerful things out there. But she�s wrong about the Midwest. There is nothing bigger than a night sky looming over the prairie.

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