I danced with the moon last night. No, really, I did. At first, it was more a game of peek-a-boo than anything, but we became a pair, the moon and I. He pulled, I followed.
It started, like many a duet, without me seeing him coming. He tapped on my shoulder from out of the midnight’s deep blue. I was driving toward home through the woods, those woods that huddle next to the lake that laps at the prairie, when the road took a rise. There he was, round and ready. Orange, so orange. I blinked, not sure what I was seeing: It was something the color of cheese, just through the trees. One minute I saw it; the next it was gone.
Had I not had my hands on the wheel, I would have rolled down the window and gawked. It’s not every night that the moon is bright orange, and it’s not every night that it calls you by name. But that moon, it called me. As if it were a magnet, that moon sucked me straight to the water’s edge and I got as close as the land would allow. If I’d had less sense, I’d have jumped in that lake and slapped through the water. That big, beautiful moon took my breath away, took it in a way that felt elemental, felt essential. It pulled me through the night.
To dance with the moon, to play catch with a raindrop, to give names to the flowers, to whisper to worms, is to let down all those things that keep us apart. It is to whirl in the zydeco jig of creation, to say we belong to the same riotous and marvelous wonder-filled notion. Once I caught sight of that moon, I pressed my foot a bit nearer to the torn mat under the gas pedal. I drove like a woman late for a date; I was afraid by the time I caught up I might miss him. And this was a dance I was not sitting out.
As I hurried past a mile or two of trees and old houses, I thought it sad that all the windows I passed hadn’t a clue of the moon playing out there. That moon was a sly one; it did not bare its face to just any old house. It was too low in the sky for most of the folks who were turning out lights, going to bed. When I got to the place where the road was no longer, I pulled to the curb, locked the car, and walked through the night.
I wasn’t afraid. Not much anyway. I was going, after all, to play with the moon. The moon, I knew, was watching. Who ever heard of a curly-haired, 50-year-old lady stricken while chasing the moon? And then I got to the lake’s edge, where the moon was melting all over the water. I stood there, neck bent, head back, my eyes, I’m certain, reflecting the moon. I heard the slap of the lake against rocks, against pier. I felt the sand through my toes. I watched the orange drain out of that moon as it inched higher.
I stood stockstill and basked in the ooze of the moon on water. That moon hung there, bold and unblinking. No shy suitor, this one. It would have beamed beyond daybreak but, at last, I bid it good night.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara Mahany. All rights reserved.