Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
The last two nights the Thanksgiving Moon has hung like a pale lantern behind the clouds. The moon draws out of me such tender feelings, yearnings. Maybe it’s the corollary of the old lover’s cliche, we’re seeing the same moon tonight.
What crosses my mind are all those long ago relatives, bearers of my genetic markers, on the trip out of Africa. They may have moved on nights like these when the moon was full. Or, would they have huddled around the campfire, wary of predators who saw better in the gloom?
In either case they would have looked at the same moon unchanged from the time they began to move on that most ancient human trail. Unchanged, that is, until July 20, 1969, a hot night in Muncie, Indiana when my flickering black and white pulled in the live–live–signals of Neil Armstrong setting a space-suit (space-suit!) boot on the lunar surface.
What a journey, if you think about it, from that trek across northern Africa, up into what we now know as the Middle East, to that boot touching down on the eons long undisturbed (by other than passing meteoroids) moon. Even now when we look at the moon it appears the same as it did then. Really, it’s only our knowledge that has changed, not the way it looks at night.
It pleases me to think of those, my people, in this season of the year, somewhere perhaps in a temperate latitude after thousands of years of journey, feeling a November wind chill in their face and what would become my Thanksgiving moon overhead.
