Wolf Moon

Even if the full moon frosts the hills with its pale light and a satellite passes dreamily across the sky, I would much prefer to be asleep. The night is so long when youwatch it. I have been lying awake for hours listening to the hums and snores of this sleeping house.

I am weary of the noisy clamor of my thoughts.

We spent the day with friends who are visiting us for the weekend. They are friends we have known for decades, friends with whom we rode bicycles and tended to our children and kept in touch through years of change and constancy. This particular get-together included their teen-aged daughter, a son attending college at UCSB, and the son’s roommate. We walked on the beach at low tide, marveling atstarfish, sea anemones, an intrepid crab with an amputated claw scuttling along the wet sand of a shallow pool.

In the evening we saw the moon rise over the hills. When the coyotes started howling, we went outside and howled along with them.

We had pumpkin pie, still a little frozen.

Everyone went to bed.

I have been reading a book by the brilliant John Banville in which this description appears:

“As I stood there in the stillness I became aware of an almost imperceptible sound, a sort of attenuated, smoothed-out warbling. It puzzled me, until I realized that what I was hearing was simply the noise of the world, the medleyed voice of everything in the world, just going on, and my heart was almost soothed.”

Now, like a passenger afloat in a boat going no place, I wait for sleep, and I watch for it, but the moonbeam currents take me straight into the rocky shoal of brooding. It is the night of the Wolf Moon after all, and the hour of the wolf.

I try to tune my ear more deeply to the medleyed voice of everything else around me, of the world just going on. My heart is not quite soothed, but I am finally getting drowsy.