by Sarah Kilch Gaffney
We have so many names for moons: harvest, blood, blue.
I grew up by the sea, where the moon—it’s tidal force, ebb and flow—were everything.
At two, our youngest daughter finds the moon in the sky wherever she can—in the yard, out the car window, at the beach—her face a beam of delight.
We map the moon through selenography, a lunar geography.
Craters and orbits, the weight of gravity, laws of inertia.
Our middle daughter requests the story, Love, Sophia on the Moon, over and over, a space dream with the pages creased and book jacket long lost.
I wonder what the fish and periwinkles and barnacles think of the dark and light of it all, the lunar pull of tides and thalassic shifts.
Moonbeams, satellites and stars, the curved trajectory of everything.
A call and response. An inevitable muse.
At the dinner table, our eldest daughter, herself a moon, tells us about the life cycle of stars.
Moon snails, moonquakes, moonrise.
I have read Goodnight Moon to my girls hundreds of times.
Long ago, I woke as a passenger in the night to Dark Side of the Moon crackling over the radio as we drove through the mountains, the birches like ghosts edging the road.
As our daughters grow, we teach them about the curve of the earth, of the earth circling the sun, the moon circling the earth in turn, and all the circles and rings and curves: of the sky and the earth and ourselves. How we all have an axis.
How moonlight is just sunlight and earthlight—reflected.
How we are all just phases and stages of illumination.
How, in the end, we all wax and wane.
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photo credit: Gary Fultz, Unsplash
Sarah Kilch Gaffney is a writer, brain injury advocate, and homemade-caramel aficionado living in Maine. You can find her work at www.sarahkilchgaffney.com.