Sometime this month, I’ll be sitting on the couch, or making supper, or writing, and I’ll be called to come outside; to come quickly. The moon is out, one of my daughters will tell me. The full moon is shining over our Massachusetts home.
Sometime over the next year, we’ll hear about a special appearance of the moon, a must-see event, according to the person on Channel 5, or an internet post, or The Old Farmer’s Almanac. It will have a poetic name, Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Supermoon, Wolf Moon. Or perhaps, the full moon will be the closest to Earth it has been in fifty years or the closest it will be again for another sixty. Or maybe there will be a lunar eclipse, where the moon will appear as a red ball, a Blood Moon with depth and shadow that make it appear close enough to hold.
We’ll wait for the moment the newsperson or the internet or the almanac has promised is best to view the moon in some spectacular disguise. We’ll leave the house in slippers, trying first the backyard, then standing in the middle of the street, then wandering toward the railroad bridge, until the moon becomes visible over the peaked roof of the corner store or the train tracks heading to Concord, or emerges through a hole in the clouds, appearing first as a hopeful yellow-white glow before showing us its gentle face.
Or we might be driving home at night and see the full moon rising over the Mystic River, huge and low, and know that by the time we get home it will have returned to its normal size. We must look now, we know. Look, look at the full moon. How had we forgotten that this was the night?
Or maybe it’s daytime, and we’ll see it iridescent against the bright blue sky. The moon is always there, always visible, even in the day, or so we are told. Still, each time seems like a new discovery, one that must be shared.
When my youngest daughter was little, she loved the moon so much that I made her a toy one, an embroidered pillow with a softly smiling face, because it’s the face she likes best—the face made of craters, that children around the world see as a rabbit, a toad, a holy name.
When I was very little, I was told, and believed, that the moon was made of cheese. I wonder what those other children believe. I wonder how many of those children, sometime this month, will rush outside—calling to their mothers—to seek the full moon as an old friend.
As long as my daughters are with me, we will rush out to see the full moon and feel cheated if we miss it. We’ll wake up at night to look for it, bright and round in the sky. We’ll watch and exclaim and take pictures that never come out the way they should, not as big, not as clear, not as radiant against the blackness of the night sky. But we’ll try anyway, because we want to remember, to mark this small moment of connection to each other, to the people everywhere, who—as our mothers often tell us—are looking up at the same sky.
When we come back inside, my own mother will be waiting on the phone. “Did you see that moon?” she’ll ask us. “How did it look from your house?”
