Shine on, shine on harvest moon
Up in the sky,
I ain't had no lovin'
Since January, February, June or July
Snow time ain't no time to stay
Outdoors and spoon,
So shine on, shine on harvest moon,
For me and my gal
"Shine On Harvest Moon"
by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth - 1903
Stumbling out into the crisp, hushed, pre-dawn gloom before 6 a.m. this morning, I gasped audibly as a huge limpid moon hung just out of reach over the back fence, gloriously circular and radiating an energy I could feel swelling in my chest.
No wonder people have attributed every manner of influence over the affairs of man and beast — from insanity ("lunacy") to casino payouts, earthquakes, and lycanthopy — to this beguiling, commanding figure with the power to transform the night into a silvery simulacrum of the day and to pull tides heavenward from the skin of the seas.
And it wasn't even the full moon! The storied Harvest Moon, the first full moon following the autumnal equinox (on or around September 23) in the Northern hemisphere, rises to its full glory tonight beginning around 6 p.m. and attains its maximum shadow-casting orbular effulgence at 11:13 p.m. ET.
To top off tonight's lunar manifestation, in addition to being full onto bursting, the earth's only satellite will be 12% larger than some of the full Moons this year because it is near perigee, the point on its slightly oblong orbit that is closest to Earth.
So not only will this Harvest Moon appear bigger when its rising from the horizon in the east tonight (called the Moon Illusion, for some reason the Moon appears larger when it is near the horizon than when it is higher in the sky), this one will actually be one big bloated bopper by which farmers can frolic in their fecund fields into the very visible night, picking pumpkins, peas, peppers, potatoes, and paw paws in plainly perceptible plenitude until the wee hours.
Article comments
1 - Dawn
May the moon in all its fullness and glory shine upon you in goodness...or something. Great post as usual.
2 - Eric Olsen
thanks Dawn, it was very experiential!
3 - duane
Some mighty fine writing there. Educational, too. Thanks.
So, will the incidence of lycanthropy increase by 12% ? If so, I'm not going out tonight. Screw the harvest.
4 - Christopher Rose
I love the Harvest Moon and have many happy memories of it. These include walking, drunk and 13, up to the peak of Mount Snowdon, the highest mountain in North Wales and, more recently, driving almost 1100 kms in 9 hours from North West Spain through Portugal and on to central Andalucia this very week, both under the protective light of the selfsame moon you saw.
5 - Eric Olsen
thanks duane
wow Chris, sounds like a post!
6 - Chris Olsen
Dad that was a delectable ditty daring delightful doppelgangers to deliriously dissipating dragoon drummers. (alliterations out of context are great)
7 - duane
My son plays a little word game like so: turn an adjective into a noun, say, ridiculous --> ridiculosity. Then attach that noun to an event or circumstance, modified by the adjective, which is pre-modified by an adverbial form. So, he might be watching TV and make the comment, "What a ridiculously ridiculous piece of ridiculosity," or "what crappily crappy crap that was," etc. The harvest moon would be a moonily moony moon.
8 - Eric Olsen
hi Chris, alliteration rules! So did you have a Moon down there?
duane, we do that too, but I don't remember all the grammatical terms defining it
9 - Mary K. Williams
This was cool Eric and congrats on your Ed pick. Nice to see another Olsen chiming in too.
10 - -E
Congrats! This article has been selected as one of this week’s Editors’ Picks.