Departure

The Moon, cold love that she is, continues to slowly drift away from the Earth, increasing the space between by something near an inch-and-one-half each year. Consider this, without the Moon’s gravity clasping us, we and our blue planet would soon rotate wildly, wobbling without control as a top spinning down just prior to crashing to the floor and skittering to a stop. Climates here would shift entirely in only years or months—ice ages coming and going with the rapidity of our present seasons.

And if this is not enough change for you, then contemplate our Sun as it gradually consumes itself and fizzles down. Near the end of days, it will reach out, enveloping all of the solar system and the planets still circling as beads swirled in a salad bowl. And the sun will abruptly superheat and consume the plants.

But the Moon is fixed our best dreams, those softly lighted, and others where words come easy and white doves flutter down bearing pure sugar cubes, ours for the taking. She pulls tides over us like blankets. She strolls quietly though the tall trees along the mountains, and yet all the time she plots her eventual departure. The Sun, now bright, but caught in a self-consuming waltz.
We, too, plan our leave. Our strategy is not nearly as inexorable as that of the Sun and Moon and alarmingly recent. With rockets we climb the thin black skies. In the Apollo missions we left at 35,000 feet per second. And we came back again. We must go. We must go because the Moon and the Sun conspire against us, because we cannot stay here forever, because even lowly rock doves scatter as we reach for them.

--Mitchell Hegman