Super Moon...

I was reading about the ‘Supermoon’ that’s gonna light up the night sky this month…the largest, they say, since 1948….

Got me to thinking ’n I remember the moon from 1948…hadn’t thou’t about it forever ’n ever but in 1948 we lived in Beattyville, next to the railroad tracks and across the street from John Stephenson…

The moon was so large and so bright that November that you could read by the light of the moon…I recall standing in our side yard one crisp night (read cold for crisp) and the moon seemed to be sitting on the hill that overlooked our little village…’Course, back then I never thought of Beattyville as a village, it was pretty much my world at the time.

I’ve been reading O’Reillys books, Killing Patton ’n Killing the Rising Sun and they’re brought back a lot of mem’ries of that time…even in the little world that my friends and I inhabited, we were aware of what was going on in the rest of the world…you couldn’t help but know…the newspapers, the news reels at the movies, the paper and tin can drives that we all participated in, the Victory gardens in almost every yard…the ration books that parents complained about…the window decorations that told everyone that a family member from that house was in the military and the black ribbons that told us that someone was not going to return…O, we were aware of the rest of the world alright….everyone knew someone that was ‘over there’ for Europe and ‘out there’ for the Pacific…

Anyway, I digress here as I’m wont to do but the memories keep coming in the night, mainly, when I’m asleep…memories of a long-ago childhood in a gravel street village, of summer nights ’n June bugs, of winter snow and sledding on the railroad crossing on our street….if you got a good enough run at it, you could go all the way to end of the street where it went over the hill to the riverbank..

And of the giant moon that looked over Beattyville back when our world was new….

I hope this giant moon of today will make a lot of memories for people today…

Enjoy, Justin Other Smith