December 1, 2009
Tuesday

The autumn air is clear,
The autumn moon is bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter,
The jackdaw perches and starts anew.
We think of each other–
                    –Li Bai, 701-762
Chinese poet

It was only a month ago that I defined the work hours in my studio as Angelus to Angelus, noon to six. I had been keeping that schedule most days since the beginning of September. It was still summer then, and we were running our lives by Daylight Saving Time, so it was light well past the ringing of the bells. We turned the clocks back as the moon waxed to full in November, and now the sun sets before 5:00 and it is solid night at the hour that I leave for home.

My studio is the attic space at the top of the house. It has no interior dividing walls and so has windows on all four sides. One day at the beginning of November I had been immersed in my writing for several hours and was unaware how late it had gotten. I stood up from my desk and turned to see the deep yellow fireball of the setting sun shining straight through the west window. Its rays bounced off the glass surfaces of the tall buildings that faced it on the east shore of the river. As it sank below the horizon it began to illuminate the moon, just rising directly across the water.

In the weeks that followed, other concerns dominated my attention, and as the moon waned and then disappeared I became less aware of the dance of light and energy that the natural phenomena present. Thus the full moon, faithful and mad, took me by surprise again tonight.

The Dakotah Sioux called this moon the Twelfth Moon. We’ll have two in this calendar month, bidding farewell to 2009 on New Year’s Eve under the light of a Blue Moon. To the ancient Celts it was the Cold Moon, or the Moon before Yule.

Some years ago I did a personal growth exercise that asked me to imagine my mother, then my grandmother, and then on back through my maternal line as they were when they were my age. I was 45 then. I pictured my mother at 45, the year we moved to the neighborhood I can see from my studio and I had to start second grade in a new school. When my grandmother was 45 she had a grown son and two teenage daughters and was a hardworking postman’s wife in the heyday of a Pennsylvania coal mining town. Beyond that I had to guess, because I know little about my foremothers. I did conclude, however, that if I could go back far enough, I could find a woman who walked the moors or machairs of pre-Christian Ireland and found her spirituality, her connection to the divine, by the light of the moon.

“We think of each other,” Li Bai wrote as he pondered the autumn moon. Tonight I think of another descendant of that Celtic woman at the weir, my cousin Rosemary McGroarty Ymzon. She was born on this day in 1941, and as I told her this morning, even though that was five-and-a-half years before I was born, I have a memory of those days. Rosemary’s mother was my Aunt Mary, 32 years old as she gave birth to her second child. My mother, Rose, was the younger sister, just turned thirty, single, and working for the federal government in the capital city some seventy miles from their home town.

I have a picture of Rose and her new car, a 1939 black Chrysler, taken in the spring of 1940. She stands beside her father, who would be dead before his second grandchild was born. It is the car she was driving on December 7, 1941, along Route 61 between Mahanoy City and Tamaqua, taking her mother to see the new baby. Very likely she turned on the radio for some entertainment, and heard the news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and the country was now at war. For many years I thought my cousin had been born on December 6. It was not until a notification of which of my Facebook friends was having a birthday this week that I knew my mother and my grandmother were on their way to see a week-old baby girl.

We think of each other. We carry each other. We carry each other’s stories, even if our memories are received ones, even if the details are sometimes a little off. Happy Birthday to my cousin, as we move into a new month, a month with two moons, a month to rest, to remember, to start anew.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
To comment or to be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent