Last Week's Moon

Last week I set my alarm for 5 AM to ensure it wouldn’t be the one time I slept in. In an Adirondack chair on the deck, wrapped in a blanket and holding a cup of warm coffee in my hands, I watched the full moon move slowly to my right, westward, over the unbroken shoulders of the Mayacamas Mountain Range. The grayscape glowed like a low-watt nightlight in the dark morning sky and dropped from view without a sound.

In the past few years, I have become mesmerized by the moon in all its phases, its science and its mythology. The Roman goddess, Diana, fierce and independent, claimed the moon as her kingdom and wore the crescent as a crown. The tides answer to the moon — greater at a full moon but even at other times the pull is there, quieter but constant. In winter, when the Earth is closer to the sun, the tides run even higher and at the Bolinas Lagoon they frequently flood the road to my home.

The moon’s names come from indigenous knowledge, European folk tradition, and American popularization—often in refence to the weather or seasonal agriculture. This May, among its many names, are the Grass Moon, the Corn Planting Moon, or my favorite since I have chickens, the Egg Laying Moon. Come winter, there are the Long Night Moon, the Wolf Moon and the Snow Moon, which the mere thought of any of these makes me want to make soup.

I have always stopped for the moon. The same person throughout the years, but not quite. When I was 12, at Sugar Pine Point Campground on Lake Tahoe, I alternated between looking up into the night sky and the scratchy picture on a black and white TV as an astronaut walked on the moon, wondering how it was possible. In my early twenties, alone and cooking in restaurants in France, I’d leave work depleted, see the moon, and think of my friends and family back home looking up at that same moon. It made me less lonely. And now, I think of how a sailor crossing the Indian Ocean on a trade route watches the moon reflect off the water and how a goat shepherd in the rural hills of Morocco gazes up at it while his herd rests. I like to believe we are all joined, living the best lives we can.

The good news is in May there is a second Full Moon within the calendar month—a somewhat rare occurrence that happens only every 2-3 years. It’s called a Blue Moon — a name, legend has it, rooted in an old expression meaning something impossible or absurd, and also a writer’s misreading of an almanac that stuck. When it happens, you’ll find me again on the deck, wrapped in a blanket, coffee in hand.

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