The final gift from my home on the hill and it opened the floodgates. I finally wept as the blood red, wolf moon appeared from behind the clouds before dawn on a cold January morning – not that there were wolves howling here; it was completely still, completely silent. No wind, no sound. It was only when a sliver of white light started its peel across the lunar landscape that a hunting tawny kee-wicked from the wood and the land began to wake again. A farm dog barked across the valley and the trees rustled overhead.

Within a week I will have moved from here and how I’ll miss it. The silence, the wildlife, the isolation, the memories of the fine times we’ve had. I’m bottling up my grief to get through it, but this morning it spilt and overwhelmed me.

I’ve seen lunar eclipses before. The most memorable was in high summer, a bright then darkening midnight walk across the Welsh hillside with a friend and his terrier; the dog got more and more fretful as the moonlight dimmed and he finally had to be carried. Then there was the friend who went into labour with the full moon, whose contractions stopped as the moon went into shadow and started again as its light returned. A hundred miles away and in the days before mobiles and social media made communication instant, I knew in my gut her babe was coming and wandered out into the night to watch the fiery moon and send love their way.

And here on this hill I’ve had a decade of living close to these dark skies and being in tune with their shifts and shapes. There have been other eclipses, although all too often obliterated by cloud cover; we have lain out in the field on summer nights watching for shooting stars, there have been full moon parties… 

This faithful moon has marked my time here and now, in eclipse, marks my leaving.