Moon Struck and Home Bound

🌝 Leave it to the full moon to jump start the crazy thinking.

¹

The full moon and I are not friends. I tried to cross the street when I saw Thursday night’s harvest supermoon coming, but it wasn’t having any of that. It pursued me doggedly. Wouldn’t leave me alone. Refused to let me sleep.

Eventually I gave up pretending it was just another night and that one more round of naming all the dahlias in bloom would lull me to sleep.

I got out of bed, pulled on my super-sweater, traipsed downstairs trying not to wake sleeping dog or man, and curled up in my comfy chair with my super-book, the 736-page The Covenant of Water.

This is just super, I thought to myself. Perhaps I should pop popcorn for the light show!

Instead, I did something I would regret in the morning. I swallowed two Advil. Eh, not such a big deal, you say. I washed them down with a cup of warm milk (okay, hot cocoa) since Advil generally makes me sleepy. I figured that and a few thousand words of Abraham Verghese and I’d be out cold.

I figured right. By 3:30 a.m. I was on my way back upstairs, eyelid-droopingly tired. The problem came at 8:30 a.m., when the last justifiable tap of the snooze button had passed. I had no choice but to get up with just shy of five hours of sleep, which is below the minimum allowable fatigue threshold (per the life manual), even for me. As a bonus, the residual effects of two Advil in my system made me feel like I had drunk a bottle of Scotch the night before. (I don’t know why Advil does this to me.) That alone gave me a moment of fright, though I quickly remembered it was only a night of good old-fashioned full-moon fun I was recovering from.     

My husband thinks my theory about the full moon is so much poppycock. But fortunately, I have the all-powerful Oz – I mean Google – on my side. I had no trouble finding “proof” that people can and do sleep less well and for less time during the full moon. (You know the drill – a study for everything.)

Science hasn’t quite figured out the “why” part. It’s possible that moonlight affects melatonin protection. But even completely swathed in light-blocking headgear (the ultimate full-moon fashion statement), some of us still have trouble sleeping. A full moon can mess around with the earth’s magnetic field or gravitational pull. Personally, I’m going with the gravity thing.

The reason that this affects me more than my husband is that I am made of water and he is made of golf balls.

2

The Owl and the Pussycat certainly knew what to do on a full moon night: they got married. They dined on mince and slices of quince/which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand/They danced by the light of the moon,/The moon,/The moon,/They danced by the light of the moon.

No dancing for me Thursday night. But I did keep an ear cocked for Trustyfriend, our resident owl, while I waited for time to pass and words to swim in front of my eyes.

In my exaggerated anthropomorphizing of every living creature, I want to believe that Trustyfriend really is “our” owl. We hear her many evenings after dinner, high up in the oaks out back. And now that I’ve read Carl Safina’s endearing essay, A Home for Alfie, in the latest Orion magazine, I understand better how territorial owls can be. (I’m looking forward to reading Safina’s book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, coming out this week.) It’s fascinating how owls can nest in the same vicinity for years.

Perhaps I should be worried that owls are also considered omens of death in some cultures. But I’m going to conveniently lean into the belief that, like The Dragonfly Messengers, the owls embody spirits departed who are hanging around to keep an eye on us or to transfer wisdom to us. It’s probably not a good thing that we named Trustyfriend after the owl in Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land who met with an unpleasant fate.

3

The fact that the owl and a host of other critters seek shelter in our yard makes me happy. The print copy of Orion, the one with Safina’s essay in it, lay at my feet Thursday night and I stared at the cover photos and words. The theme of the issue, “Seeking Shelter: The Environments of the Unhoused and Displaced,” resonated loudly with me.

Having just finished reading Tracy Kidder’s Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People, I had been thinking a lot about home – what it is, where it is. And why some people seem destined to live their lives unhoused. Destined because of two kinds of human behavior: the horrific kind – most often childhood abuse – and the well-meaning kind, which creates laws that protect some and condemn others. In other words, some people get kicked around as kids and booted around by the system as adults. Add untreated mental health issues, the uber-availability of addictive drugs, and the disappearance of low-income housing, and the odds of getting off the street – for some people – are slim.

And now thanks to Kidder and Dr. Jim, “some” of those “people” had become real to me. Instead of anonymous statistics, they had names and personalities. A loop began to play in my head and I couldn’t reconcile my knowledge of these people’s lives with the knowledge that mega-homes (15,000 square feet and up) are being built on this Island, only to be used for a few weeks out of the year and otherwise left empty (but “maintained” with abundant use of wasted energy), housing no one.

It’s not that I’m unaware of the extremely complicated issues that housing the unhoused presents in this country (read these comments for a taste of it) – and I’m not suggesting that the well-off should be directly housing people. It’s just that I mourn the disparities and fractures in our culture caused by greed, fear and soul-sucking ambition. I constantly wonder just how big the hole is that some folks need to fill when bigger and more is never enough.

4

I had to let that loop play on in my head as I finally stumbled up the stairs Thursday night. (Incoming from the night’s reading of The Covenant of Water was an even more vivid picture of life on a rustic, isolated outpost in Kerala, India around 1900, where our beloved protagonist sleeps [mostly happily] on a bamboo mat on a porch, cheek to jowl with the rest of her family.)

I used the flashlight on my phone to avoid stepping on Farmer, who’s taken to sleeping as close to my husband as possible – which means on the floor next to him, practically underneath the bed, and in the path I must take to get to my side of the bed. His soft dog bed is six feet away. Go figure.  

I heard my husband gently snoring and could see that he still had his eye-mask on, in deference to me reading in bed at night – something I always do optimistically at the start of bedtime, hoping it will induce sleepiness.  

At that moment when I looked at him, my heart swelled. I felt a lump in my throat. I’m not exaggerating. I was simply momentarily overtaken with a feeling of love and gratitude.  

There he lay, this kind and loving man who puts up with every ridiculous idiosyncrasy of mine. (Or most of them, anyway.) When my foibles plague me to the point of distraction, he assesses the situation in his lawyerly way and offers compassion or level-headed advice or both. It’s true that he enables my chocolate habit, but nobody’s perfect.

5

“This is your home,” he said to me, when I first moved in with him. I wasn’t so sure. I felt awkward for a while, even though I was now living in a “normal” house again, as opposed to the rustic two-room digs I’d been renting while I deposited the last of my savings into a little ranch house in Delaware, where my parents would live and I expected I would move to once I could no longer afford to live on the Vineyard. (I figured I had no more than three years.)

I have lived on top of a general store, over a garage, beneath the main living quarters of someone else’s house, in a tiny uninsulated farmhouse with a barely existent bathroom. I’ve lived in beach cottages, backyard “cottages,” and brick houses in the suburbs. I’ve lived in a one-room Brooklyn studio and a railroad flat on the upper East side with the tub in the kitchen. I’ve lived in dorm rooms and cabins with shared bathrooms. I’ve lived in a former factory. I have lived in a beautiful, custom-designed house on the water. I’ve lived high and low.

I’ve lived — meaning spent more than a few weeks — in at least 30 different dwellings. That averages out to one move every two years.

All I really want is to be home.

More and more I keep telling myself that home is not a place. When I watch my husband sleeping, I think, “Home is where he is.” Maybe that’s a convenient – or better yet, consoling – way of taking the onus of restlessness off myself. Some vision of my ideal home in the ideal place still dogs me. It probably always will. But I do feel like, in my love and gratitude for my partner (and by the grace of God), I’ve found something more worth nurturing than a specific dwelling or address. And I will always be grateful for having a roof – any roof – over my head.

🌝