Every once in a while, there is a moon so beautiful, so alluring, so awesome that we will wake our kids from bed to carry and lead them, grumbling, rubbing their eyes out onto our back porch.

“Look at that moon,” we tell them as they shiver and scoot their half-asleep bodies closer to ours. Our youngest wraps her arms tighter around my shoulders.

“That’s pretty,” they say, “can we go back to bed now?”

In the late winter and early spring, we can sometimes hear an owl hooting, low and rhythmic, in a nearby tree.