* * Dancing (okay, walking) in the moonlight

We get it almost everynight
When that moon gets big and bright
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancing in the moonlight

            Van Morrison

Okay, I wasn’t really dancing, but I just returned home from a 4-mile walk in the moonlight on the Huckleberry Trail with my dog, Shasta.  I love to walk; she does too.  It’s great exercise and good thinking time.  This time of year, if I’m in my office all day, it’s dark by the time I get home.  So if I’m going to walk at all, it’s usually in the dark.  I don’t prefer the dark, but I don’t mind it, either.  Especially if there’s a moon out, there’s enough light to see where I’m going and to stay on the trail. It’s occasionally spooky, but the solitary aspect is enticing.
The moon is a few days from full, at which time it rises at sunset. As walked around 7:00 p.m., it was directly overhead.  Only the brightest stars of Orion and Cassiopeia dared to compete with the overwhelming brightness of the moon.  Shasta and I cast a clear moon-shadow as we walked.  
As my third book starts approaching its completion, I’m thinking about book number four.  In this one, I plan to return to the world of fiction. I have a setting and a premise, but not yet a story.  The opening scene is at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax.  The gates open at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday in August, even though the competitive events don’t begin until Wednesday night.  As people come streaming in to claim their usual spots, the power goes out.  No big deal, people think, as it will be restored quickly.  But this is not to be. The power grid has been attacked and the power won’t be restored forever, or at least that’s the conclusion people begin to reach as the days that follow remain in the dark.
Shasta and I traverse an open area south of the entrance to Warm Hearth Village.  There are a few homes nearby and some have Christmas tree lights sending lumens into the cold night sky.  Coal is being burned in the power plants in West Virginia, turning water into steam that spins turbines that powers the shafts of dynamos, sending electrons streaming at nearly the speed of light through miles of copper wire, powering our civilization.
I’m wearing three layers atop and two on my legs.  I have a polypropylene shirt, a fiber-pile shirt-jacket, and my heavy down parka.  I wear long johns and heavy wool Swiss army pants.  I have wool gloves and a stocking cap.  It’s biting cold, perhaps 18F, but I’m comfortable.  As my legs loosen and my pace quickens, I watch vapor clouds stream from my nose and mouth.  
We enter a wooded area between Hightop and Merrimac Roads.  Where the sun hasn’t hit the trail since a dusting of snow fell a few days earlier, there are lots of patches of ice that crunch when we walk over them.  
My mind drifts back to my book and the idea of living without electricity.  The sun will still rise and the birds will still sing.  But gasoline won’t get delivered to the stores that sell it and what’s there won’t be pumped into our cars.  We won’t be going nowhere. Fresh food at the grocery stores will spoil in a few days and there won’t be new deliveries. And the lights won’t come on.  We’ll spend lots more time in the dark and we’ll be in bed much earlier, hungry.  
Shasta and I enter the area that once was the Merrimac coal mine.  Coal hasn’t been mined here for decades, but this area is thought to have provided the coal that made the steel used in the Confederate warship the Merrimac.  Ghosts of the coal miners are all around and much of the ground is still black.  
We turn around just before the long bridge over the active rail line not far from the New River Valley Mall.  The bridge has a slope to it, and with ice on the boards, I don’t want to risk sliding on it.  The trail gets lots of use, more all the time.  But tonight it belongs to Shasta and me; there’s nobody else around.
The moon is so bright I can see the outline of trees on nearby hillsides.  I’m not exercising hard enough to work up a sweat, but I become warm enough to open my parka and unzip my jacket underneath.  Shasta ambles along, oblivious to the cold.  
Most people, I’m sure, take electricity for granted.  I think some people believe it is manufactured magically behind the wall socket.  I’ve always been haunted by the fragility of it.  If and when it was to ever be gone, it would change every aspect of our lives. It is a burden of dread that sometimes I can’t shake.
We reach the car and electro-mechanical things quickly happen again with the turn of a key.  We drive the short half-mile trip to our street and return to our electrically treated home, where the heat pump churns away quietly outside the living room window.