We are home again, Doug, Chalet and I and a raw homecoming it was, too. The Duluth harbor is still locked in ice - true, it's largely broken up into great, rough, uneven chunks but the whole end of this arm of Lake Superior is white with deteriorating ice. We stopped outside of town alongside the interesting-looking building with the interesting & alliterative name of Limnological Laboratory & walked out to touch the ice - I picked up or lifted up a large chunk of ice which appeared clear & airless so transparent it was but as I raised what I would up & out of the water into the air it became a crystalline - [?] - sparkling clear & full of faceted holes reflecting sunlight.
Later - evening - we walked - we ran-along railroad tracks - we followed, watched, spied upon a dozen or more povers tip toeing along field rows, across roads, up & down the tracks, calling back & forth to each other, smart & neat - and now back tired & look out upon the lake and all I see is a solid backdrop of blue against which were only to be seen the pencilled sketches of bare birch trees, naked shrubs & tall grasses. Yet as I looked, trying to separate color from substance, to better name it, I became aware of a fine distinction between water & sky & then behold! There was a rare spot of color intruding upon the sameness - it was ghostly and strange and warm by contrast. We doused the light & saw, of course, it was the moon, a full, fat, orange moon I had not expected & as we watched it cleared itself from the veil & trailed its own train of color across the lake to us. It was our night, our world, our moon.
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