What is it about the Moon?

Both my girls treat it like a person, running to meet the moon like granny at the airport. It happened first when our eight year-old was nearly two. She saw it one late afternoon making a premature appearance in an autumn sky hours before the stars, sat right down in the middle of the path, stretched her toddler arms out to it and pleaded “Come”. Where have I been for so long, I thought, that I have should have forgotten the moon’s face?

Our younger one, now not yet three, with perhaps less poetry in her soul but a greater love of motion, spies the moon in the sky and insists that Mummy run along with the pushchair singing a falling three note tune “Hello, moon, moon, moon, Hello moon, moon, moon, Hello Moon.” Knowing the second time around that two-years old doesn’t last long, I forget about what the neighbours will think and oblige her, chugging up Black Bank a little breathless. I think she hopes we will catch it up, or believes that it is having a race with us.
The eight year-old doesn’t sit in the path anymore waiting for the moon to come. She wants to know about waxing and waning. Realising that along with the Kings and Queens of England and the 52 States of America here is another tranche of information I have once been taught and forgotten, I look up the moon’s details in a tatty old book in my husband’s study and discover that if you put your right hand up to the moon and it fits the ‘C’ shape of your hand it is waxing and if it fits the ‘C’ shape of your left hand it is waning. That’s ok I can remember that – my mother taught me to beeswax the dining room table when I was a girl --waxing is forever right handed for me.

As for my mother, she is waning. Far off in the delightful climate of the Southern United States she is getting smaller and smaller. Her ears hear less on the telephone. Her letters are fewer and shorter. Not yet a sliver of herself, she is, I have to face it, in decline. I wish she weren’t. I wish I could stop it. (If I lived closer I would build a high wall around her like they talk of building round Venice. A kind of sea defense against time.) I love the seasons, their changes and chances, but this is where my being in harmony with the natural flow of life ceases. I want to go backwards, hear her tell me to polish that spot again, show me how to put my eye at the edge and look sideways for smudges and gleam. I would happily take the ache back into my skinny schoolgirl arms, rub the rag round and round forever if it could take the wane away.

Wild and inquisitive, my own girls are all wax. Me? I go on hoping I am not yet quite full, and don’t really want to know in case I am wrong.

Whaddya think? Maybe my two year-old is right. Maybe the moon is having a race with us after all.