Drawing the Moon

I shut down the computer last night and looked out the window at a cloud covered sky. No moon in sight. Resigned the full moon walk and settled myself on the couch with chocolate trail mix and Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen. Fifteen minutes later the clouds rolled over and the moon was bright enough to come streaming into my living room. Winter having finally descended, it's delay a little creepy, I threw on about forty sweaters and headed outside to walk up the hill and hang out with the bright light in the sky.

The night is always quiet where I live. The houses are spaced by about a quarter mile and the only noise I usually hear, other than the bard owls, is the male donkey down the road. When Blue hollars, he sounds like he's on the verge of a painful death. He's the only stud among nearly forty female donkeys. Can you just imagine the pheremones in that barn!? Ella's little friends get frightened when they hear it in the dark. It's a combination of deep, passionate, primitive longing and pure torture. Hormones can be like that.

But Blue must have been satiated because the valley was quiet. And the ground was glittering with the new snow of the season. I walked up the road to where the Dezotelle's old farmstead used to be. There's an old trailer now where the brick farmhouse used to be before it burned to the ground. Beside the trailer is a gargantuan barn and beyond that is a long stretch of Sound of Music pastures. The location of this place is a wind turbine's dream. There have been times in the past when I've found myself up there, at the end of the dirt road and under the bright moon, dancing slow and feeling peaceful. Like prayer in movement, all covered in wind.

I think this what I had in mind with this moon walk, but on my way up the road I noticed that my boot tracks were not the only ones in the newly fallen snow. There was another track, much bigger and with a much longer gait. A man's boot. One heading in the direction I was walking and then the same boot track heading the opposite way. But I didn't know which direction had come first. The coming or the going. And I knew that at the top of the hill I wouldn't feel alone enough to pick up a dance. To pray to the moon. To even feel safe, safe as this mountain town is. I grew up in a weird little town where men with no teeth whistle at 11 year old girls and turn their car around to gawk and be creepy. Too much of that is still with me. I tried walking in his tracks for about forty seconds, just to try it on for size and maybe overcome my jitters, but my dog is old and I didn't trust her to protect me so I turned around, feeling a ghost at my back.

I climbed back up my driveway and found myself behind my house, in my own yard, which isn't really a yard but about 20 acres of pasture. I walked out to the middle of it until I felt like I was in the center of someone's hand. In the palm. And I stood there looking up at the moon until I was dizzy with how fast the clouds moved.

I stood listening to the wind move down valley along the western ridge. It sounded like a creek in mid-April after the snow has melted from the mountains. It sounded like a freeway or the constant crashing of the tide. It was that glorious nothing kind of white noise of nature that doesn't get heard above the boots crunching in the snow. And I had to walk a long line down my memory to remember the last time I afforded myself this luxury. The last time I just sat and listened to wind. How much motion there is in just standing still.