Blog: Lunatic Moon by Jessie Close

I drove through a shower of yellow aspen leaves while on my way home from town yesterday.  My heart soared!  Trees are red, yellow, some mottled green with yellow.

The moon kept me awake last night and it’s not even full yet.  I guess I have to accept the fact that I won’t sleep very well for the next few days.  Saturday will be the full moon.  I guess I’m the real definition of a lunatic: ‘someone who experiences intermittent insanity when the moon is full’.  Last night I lay in bed and could see the almost full moon through the huge trees next to my house.  When a breeze hit the upper branches of the cottonwoods the moon winked and winked.  I don’t have curtains on that window so, unless I moved to the couch, I couldn’t help seeing the moon.

Then I heard the packrats banging around under my sink.  The dogs are so used to hearing them that they didn’t budge.  The packrats have brought leaves and branches up from the crawl space.  They have stuffed one of my kitchen drawers so full of leaves and sticks that I can’t even open it more than an inch!  It’s lucky that I don’t keep anything in that drawer. My problem with these packrats is that I respect their smarts.  My daughter, Mattie, has had two pet rats who were incredibly intelligent.  I know I should do something about them but besides killing them I don’t know what I should do.  I could perhaps find a large Have-a-Heart trap and see if they’ll go into it.  Then I could drop them off at someone else’s house! (just kidding, maybe).  I’ve been told that packrats are too smart and won’t go into a Have-a-Heart trap but I should at least see if possibly they would.  These guys operate at high speed in the wee hours of the night so, if it wasn’t for the full moon, I wouldn’t have heard them.  So, I can blame the moon for keeping me awake and for forcing me to hear the packrats.  And for turning me into a lunatic once per month; others may disagree with this, as far as once per month is concerned.

Every night, right before bed, I yell “Okay, everybody OUT!” to the dogs and we all go outside.  They pee and I look at the stars, unless there’s total cloud cover.  The moon last night was already so bright that I could see down to the creek and to the other side where the field swoops up into the foothills and mountains.  The light was soft, thick.  I got a slight tingling in my spine as I wondered if a mountain lion was watching me from the willows.

I can’t remember when the moon began keeping me awake; possibly forever.  I have three children and two came on the full moon, the other was a c-section.  When I was pregnant with Mattie, and nearing her birth, I knew to watch the moon as my water would break when it was full in my last month.  And sure enough, that’s when my water broke.  When it was getting near to her birth, in the delivery room, the doctor told me that she’d be born before midnight but, even through the pain, I knew she wouldn’t be born until the moon was at it’s zenith – 1:30 AM.  And that’s when she finally arrived into the doctor’s hands.

I was born on July 17th so I’m a Cancer, ruled by the moon but, my sister Tina is also a Cancer and the moon doesn’t keep her up.  Perhaps the moon has always known that I’m a lunatic, so, that gives me something extra.

The really mysterious part of this story is that I take my bedtime medications at the same time every night and for the large part of the month I sleep quite well; I feel my medications and stumble to my bed around 11PM, too tired to read more than a few pages.  But the moon interferes with my medications.  No matter what, I can’t even attempt sleep until 1:30 or 2PM.  So, how strange is that?  Please let me know if you too are a lunatic.