The Comforts of the Cold Full Moon

Putting Everything in Perspective

There was the most beautiful full moon last night, framed in the window by my side of the bed. I was caught in its quicksilver light as I passed by on my way to the bathroom.

And so I stopped, on the way back, to get closer to the window and look up in wonder at the brightness of it. I told Wayne about it, as he’d also just been up and I knew he was still awake. From the window on his side of our bed, he gazed out and saw more than I did (because his unaided vision these days is better then mine), and reported on the four beams of light—no, there were more—radiating out from the moon, as if it were an image on a flag.

I padded in my slippers to the place on my dresser where I knew I’d put my glasses—and put them on, and walked carefully through the dark again to the window. I used one foot to push aside the basket filled with magazines, so I could stand closer: and there it was, just as he’d described.

It was a full moon so crazily bright that the plants in our yard outside, whatever plants have survived the recent snow, would surely be profiting from those photons of light, using them to continue to grow.

The part of me that is as much plant as person stood there entranced, wanting to bathe in that magical moonlight: to let it coat me in quicksilver and help me heal from the latest inevitable, casual hurts of daily life. Help me feel like just another lucky living thing on this blue-and-green rock of ours that’s hurtling through the heavens accompanied by the special silvery stone that puts us at the center of its orbit. That lump of rock that circles around us in a dance of growing and disappearing that inspired those who came before us to create calendars, to mark the months of our lives as we use them up, and fill us with wonder along the way.

That magnetizing inorganic thing that draws us in like the tides and sends us away again, whose choreography we copy in our bodies’ monthly ripeness and bleeding before we’re beyond those years.

I remember how my late beloved mother-in-law, not a person given to poetic flights of fancy, still delighted in every full moon during that final era of her long life, when I was part of it. Who laughed when I danced for her and held her hands so that even when she couldn’t walk, she could dance with me.

I read about this final full moon of the calendar year—what someone has named the Cold Full Moon—on the train yesterday on our way back from Manhattan, where our new eye doctor peered into our eyes with fancy instruments and had only good news to give us. News of no disease and the promise, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, of seeing better and being free of glasses for good.

To 11:00 of the Cold Full Moon, one bright star—probably a planet, because its light was steady—glowed like a hot coal in the weirdly illuminated nighttime sky. It was peeking out from in between the moonbeams radiating outward from the center: another planet, somewhere out there in the vastness.

And with that salvational infusion of perspective, I got back into bed and cuddled up against the warm body beside me.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

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Photo by my father, Hal Tritel, from so very long ago

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