The house we’re staying in is in the back of beyond. It’s so far off the beaten path, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live there full-time. The people who live here: Do they just surf all day? Are they artists? What’s their story?

Just sayin’: sometimes living sixty minutes outside of San Francisco feels like I live on the dark side of the moon. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live twenty minutes from the nearest town all the time.

We can see the stars here. There’s enough light pollution that we don’t see a huge sky full of the Milky Way. But we made out Orion and the Big Dipper.

As we were out walking the other night, Sophia said, “This is why they call it silver moonlight.”

I looked around, and indeed, everything was bathed in a bluish-silvery moonlight. Enough light to walk by, although I did step on a few rocks (it was an unpaved road, after all).

I wonder how many clichés (like “silver moonlight”) we’re going to rediscover. In a world where certain natural things have pretty much disappeared — the moon has never lighted anything in the Bay Area in my memory — it’s astonishing to run across the truth of old phrases I’ve certainly never thought twice about.