There is a specific spot, on the last paved road before you get to Sandhill, where – if you time it just right on any given evening – the moon's current performance is always available for free. During various seasons, one can view a dangling fish hook or a nibbled-at hand pie, a bleached out poker chip or a chipped china plate.

Even on an evening when the moon itself is invisible, the one or two nights a month when our planet’s satellite hovers directly between us and the sun, it is easy to imagine that the diva is simply offstage for a costume change.

At this specific spot – which is at the crest of a small hill – just past the intersection where a pecan orchard anchors one of the four corners and stop signs only occasionally bring vehicles to anything more solid than a rolling stop and just as the muscle memory in my hands on the steering wheel accommodate the curve that serves as a dam to the pond whose main job is to serve as an irrigation source, I can always expect entertainment and delight, not to mention the piquing and prodding that always reminds me of the simple truth that whatever its phase, I am not worthy of the moon.

Last Wednesday night, I headed home from a celebratory dinner with friends whose laughter and stories and dear, dear faces reminded me of the blessing that lies in the company of those you have known a long time, I arrived at the specific spot and was not so much greeted as slapped in the face by the full Buck Moon. The color of a blood orange and shimmering as though overlaid with iridescent mermaid scales, it had just that moment cleared the horizon and I could almost feel the residual movement of a bouncing ball.

My first thought was to pull over and take a photo. I've done it many times before, delayed my progress to capture an image of a turtle or the silhouette of a tree or the twisting fronds of a cornfield in drought. It is, though, the time of year when farm equipment wide as both lanes suddenly appear and there was really no need to turn my car into a roadside obstacle for any of the behemoths happened to be making their way home.

Besides, I would be home in five minutes and could get a photo from the deck or the front yard or, if I wanted to be really artsy, from the bedroom where the grids in the window would turn my vision into a contemporary reflection of farm life.

You can feel the lesson coming, can’t you? You are already imagining the foolishness of my certainty that the beauty would wait. You are – even as you read – wagging your grandmother’s finger in my face tut-tutting, “You know better, young lady.”

Alas, apparently, I don’t.

I hurried out of the car and up on the deck. The smoky blue sky revealed nothing. I glanced through the bedroom window on my way through the house. Nothing. I rushed into the front yard and thrust my chin into the air, camera app open and ready. And there I saw what was left of the full Buck Moon – an amorphous glow, soft and a dull pinky-orange, behind a swath of clouds moving across the sky.

I stood there for a minute or two in a cloak of regret and then, because it felt a little disrespectful not to, took the photo anyway.

It is one of the hallmarks of beauty that it evokes a desire to capture. In just about any other context, wanting to seize something – or someone – and immobilize it, to inhibit its natural growth and metamorphosis is seen as selfish, egotistical even. Why is beauty, particularly that encountered in the natural world, less valuable?

I’ve made a decision: The next time I arrive at the specific spot and encounter a full moon or a sunrise or a flash of lightning that fills the horizon, I am going to watch and gasp and whisper my thanks. And if there is to be a photographic record made of the moment, someone else will have to make it.