The months have done their moonlight flit once again, seemingly disappearing overnight and taking with them a big chunk of the year, leaving us once more scratching our heads at the threshold to year’s end.
I liken the change to a moonlight flit not only because it always seems to happen so suddenly and unexpectedly, but also because I’m looking up at a big full moon right now, as these thoughts occur to me, using its clear, serene influence to help arrange them into words before I finally ink them onto the page.
Moons and words have always had a close bond. If I ever need help when trying to clarify a thought or make sense of an image, I always turn to the poets, and their words, first. Such close observers of the world, they never seem to miss a trick and, between them, they seem to capture everything. Ted Hughes did so in such a beautifully understated way when he measured whether everything was still as it should be, in the returning of the swifts. Collected in his book Season Songs, this was obviously a turning point in the year for Hughes, a marker for the summer to come.
My marker is the moon or, rather, two moons: The Harvest Moon of September and October’s Hunter’s Moon. Great, natural punctuation points, they act as celestial bookends to the transition from one stage of annual life into another.
Moving from summer into autumn is never as simple as tipping across the equinox and ploughing on. Rather, there is always a sliding scale of first things and last things that garland the temporal line strung between these two moons.
Beginning in September, this list includes:
- The first of the leaves mellowing into their earthier hues, preparing to give up their flimsy hold
- The first of those cooling evenings that has us drawing our collars up a little higher and glancing up at the sky
- The first time in months that we can see the brief cloud of our own breath as well as hear it
- The first morning when the central heating clicks on with a whoosh!
- The first gathering of condensation on the inside of the house’s windowpanes
- The first time the air is laced with the tang of coal smoke from those few neighbours who still burn real fires to heat their homes
- The first muting of the air as fog is drawn down in a blanket to soften the light around streetlamps
- The first of the equinoctial storms.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the list tips toward final things before, in the words of Emily Bronte, ‘…night’s decay/ushers in a drearier day”, things such as:
- The last outdoor meal in short sleeves
- The last of the ripe blackberries, picked for home-made crumbles
- The last coatless walk to work
- The last warm days of the year, offered as a benediction in St. Luke’s little summer.
This is my list, these are my observations and my special little things by which I measure the p-progress of another calendar year. I count them all, check them all off the lists, feel them all and appreciate every single one of them as they occur in those weakening days between my two moons, always shining, always there.
