Ring around the moon

We're expecting 1-3 inches of snow tomorrow. Tonight ice crystals in the atmosphere enclosed the moon in a wide circle--the sort of thing that would be difficult to photograph at all and impossible to capture what it was really like, to be there and see the curvature of air delineated that way by moonlight, which is, after all, reflected from the sun, shining somewhere far away. It was fleeting, gone now, I don't know how long it lasted and I didn't try to photograph it. Maybe I should've.

This picture is (obviously) a saguaro cactus in bud. These cacti are held sacred by Native Americans, I've been told, who consider them ancestors in plant form--people who, after death, took the form of cacti. They are certainly about as humanlike as a plant gets, with their upraised arms and individual personalities.