Above photo: Northern lights over the house (which is not sinking into the earth, merely a weird camera angle).

My shadow neighbors, Gregor Trieste and Maria Gandara. Photos courtesy of Gregor Trieste

The moon gets in on the act.

THE MOUNTAINS - There are those who might call it looney, believing a tree is being playful, grabbing my winter hat and pulling it off.

That’s the way I look at it when I’m out cutting firewood and suddenly my cranium is cold, my cozy headwear stuck in a tree branch.

I have a choice - get annoyed or laugh - so I choose to think it’s the tree’s way of saying it’s okay that I’m chainsawing in its neck of the woods, making a nasty racket and wrecking the joint.

Actually, I try to be respectful and thankful for the fact that a dead oak or ash did all that growing and I’m hacking it down to stay warm.

So go on, call it goofy, but the element of living that feels most interesting is how all this stuff is intertwined including silly ‘ol me. 

Which is why I texted my neighbors, early one late night last week, after venturing outside and seeing what I deduced were the Northern Lights.

It was 1:30 in the morning. I was immediately awestruck. The strange, vibrant glow washed in waves over the mountains and my house.

There was a bright moon and wispy cloud cover which only added to the etherealness. The air was wintry (though not as bad as having my hat yanked off by a wiseguy maple on a 10 degrees day).

A touch of soonest spring allowed me to linger and wait for my neighbors, Gregor Trieste and Maria Gandara, to arrive with camera in hand.

We are our nearest neighbors. They live at the end of our road, a half mile away, or the beginning, depending upon where you start.

I hooted like an owl as they walked up and they hooted back, hearing the echo in the surrounding hills. Otherwise it was crystalline quiet.

The shapes and textures of the beams continuously shifted, sometimes faint, sometimes open majestically across the vacant black sky.

But it wasn’t empty, being also decorated by stars, the Big Dipper overhead with the fourth star of the handle holding significance.

It is there that a cherished person and I agreed to meet, when one of us returned to whence we emerged, eliminating any imagined distance between the two of us and it.  

At least that’s what the mischievous trees seem to be saying as the snows probably eventually stop, replaced by reminiscing daffodils.