I came out of the seder, and the moon was full behind a bank of patchy charcoal clouds, the rim of it just showing above the center of them, crowned with rays of soft shimmery golden light. It gilded each cloud, bright edges against their inner darkness, and lit up the misty sky. It reminded me of summer solstice two years ago at the farm, when the full moon rose hot and yellow from the trees, a shadow sunrise. I lay in my sleeping bag in the back of my truck, watching it cool to silver as it climbed, but still bright as daylight, casting hard-edged shadows and lighting up the clouds. I watched and watched them, every detail, as they drifted and shapeshifted all night long.
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I was cranky about having to run an extra errand on the way to work this morning, but as I was walking along I noticed a clump of grass that had a tiny, perfectly spherical dewdrop on the tip of each blade. And then I saw that every sparkling blade of grass in every yard had a tiny bead of dew at its tip and the sun was slanting at this dazzling angle that made everything feel unreal and I thought, I'm forty and I still don't know how to imagine myself at this age and I certainly thought I'd know it all by now, but I've been looking at dewy grass for forty years and I never once noticed that that dewy grass has a tiny sphere of dew at the tip of each blade of grass, and every part of me filled up with wonder and freshness and joy and hope and I was sundazzled and walking and completely absorbed in looking at a thousand thousand beads of dew on a thousand thousand grass blade tips, and then I looked up! And there was a teenage magnolia blooming right in front of my eyeballs, with the most spectacular purple-pink flowers just starting to unfold, and my heart just broke from the beauty and amazement and wholeness of this world.
I love watching the moon go from faint to more defined to bright as the daylight fades, and I love how it's a constant reminder that, no matter how boring or ridiculous or scary or painful life gets, we are flying through space on a rock and that's pretty neat.
The air was softer today, and I went for a walk after dinner. I was looking up at the clouds, and I saw a faint brighter spot. I knew it was the moon, because that's where the moon is at this time of the month, and that felt really good. I watched and watched as it got brighter and brighter and then a fat ghostly just-past-first-quarter moon popped out, but then thin clouds slid across its face, and then thicker ones, and in a few seconds it was enveloped again.
I smelled some really good dinner-cooking smells as I was walking home through the dark with my heavy grocery bags. Lately, smelling food is almost as delicious as eating it. I guess it's the antici
We walked through the park, full of good food with the bridge soaring over us, looking up through the electric green bead-curtain of a weeping willow covered with a fog of tiny leaves, past a wedding, across the marshy, muddy mess of enthusiastic spring grass and many equally enthusiastic dogs, and finally down to the river, still cold and fast but friendly under a deep, vibrant blue sky full of puffy white clouds and sparkling sunlight, and there were ducks and geese and cormorants and blossoming trees painted white and pink and a family with matching cardigans (including the toddler) taking a photo and a puppy, and we breathed all the air and sunlight and connection and it filled in some of the sore and lonely spaces.
Today I saw an old blue truck parked on my street, with a crumbling chunk of wood embedded in its rear bumper and a little green plant growing out of the wood.
I was sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office and feeling scared. No windows, beige walls and beige carpets and neat beige furniture chosen for its total lack of personality; a quiet, climate-controlled stasis chamber to float in while you wait, fizzing with nerves, to the soft hiss of overprocessed air that smells like nothing. The only other person there was a tiny older woman wearing long earrings, sitting on the other side of the room and looking quietly at her phone. The she laughed, and laughed again, and suddenly the room felt alive and real and we smiled at each other. We talked for a minute about how cute babies and animals are and then the nurse came to get her and I was alone, but connected and grounded again.
The moon yesterday! A barely visible sliver in the bright equinox sky as I walked home from work, a scrap of sharp whiteness as I went into dance class, a warm golden blade cradling the rest of itself when I left dance class, and by the time I got home it hung huge and low, still golden, sliding into the gathering mist behind the silhouettes of still-leafless trees.
The point of the embroidery needle goes into the cloth silently, and then there's a pop as the eye pulls free and the tension in the stretched cloth releases. The embroidery thread shhhhhhhhhhhs through the cloth until it pulls snug, and that's a stitch. You do that a thousand times while neat patterns of color grow under your fingers and turn into flowers and cussing.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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