Six years ago, on the second day of the year, I took this picture from the rooftop deck of our home in the west end of Toronto. I like the way it captures the slow return of light to the hemisphere, silhouetting stark wintry forms in the middle distance.
Light returns: already the days are seven minutes longer than they were at the Solstice, with precious extra minutes of daylight currently noticeable mainly at dusk. Soon the sun will rise noticeably earlier, and when it does, around the end of January, the buds on the silver maples will grow fat and the crows will again begin to call.
Light also returns at night. The full Wolf Moon—a Supermoon this month—rides high overhead (at its fullest this morning at 5:03 am EST), and if the weather is clear this will be the best evening to view it, rising in the east right at dusk. In Toronto, the best place to view the full Wolf Moon is in a car traveling east toward downtown along the lakeshore, early in the evening. There is uncanny beauty in the city skyline laid out beneath the huge glowing moon. If the conditions on the water are right, moonlight illuminates the lake like a painting.
I have no good photos to share of the full moon over Toronto, so here is Tom Thomson’s luminous painting ‘Moonlight’ (1915-16).
