The cold Moon loomed up through the forest, as big as a new idea, resplendent in purple robes of dusk. I saw it looking at me, and I looked back, gazing on this last tradition of the waning year before turning and walking inside. The fireside almost kept me there with warm persuasion, but I had already set up a telescope in the yard.

A friend had asked enthusiastically if I was observing the magnificence, and it seemed jaded to reply in the negative. So out the door to meet the cold Moon I went. The namesake was waiting on the mat, the cold clawing my face and crystalizing my breath, seconding the fireplace’s point. But there was the telescope, pale in the moonlight, ready to turn a green-glass eye skyward.

An ancient landscape awaited in the eyepiece, silent and fixed as characters frozen at the end scene of a movie, and what a show it must have been a few billion years ago. Fire and brimstone were etched in rocky echoes, and lava flows were settled to a peaceful gray of mature age. All of it was serene and forgotten now, lunar dust filtering onto an ancient scrapbook. Does the man in the Moon have any regrets as he flips through the pages?