The Blood Moon, our celebration
The moon was playful with a hide-and-seek of a merry-go-round as this, my companions, a shortened version of my ancestry, the last of our line, Tristan David, did his skipping sped up version of a galavant through a hillside park. He, accompanied by myself and our lovely African princess with her long, autumn-perfected red, golden and rusty brown hair, made his way up the leaf-rained slope to find our picnicky area. A darker skinned man was mistaken for a statue as he stood, yogic, contemplative, unmoving, atop a stone deck, perched at the very precipice of this, our happiest celebratory locale. Not wishing to disturb his transic state, nor desiring to be too close to the circle of grass and canine that was dedicated to those ball tossing, leash weilding dog walkers, we made our way to the eastern precipice, a tier overlooking the watertower of farthest Pittsburgh as some happy hippy types through a frisbee, long haired and smiling.
We made our camp at a picnic table labeled “Frick Park”, though the actual park it found itself, well, parking at, was not known by the same name. I lit a candle, one vanilla, one cinnamon, the official scents of the blood moon passed down from one generation to the next (beginning with my own, and as yet to be seen how many henceforth). As the two candles flickered a passionate playful togetherness, samoosas, turkish salads, vine leaves and sweet red wine (banana strawberry smoothies for aged-unders) moved about the wooden bench, easily and freely as the whispering clouds above us. I, for one, was quite happy when paper airplanes – no, rather, paper jets, with our double, sometimes triple, wing-folding style – began to fly, followed by frisbees of our own. We ate, drank, and were definitely merry, as the dusk purples and primarily crimson glow of a gorgeous Autumn sky reminded us of all we have and all we have to relish, even as this summer city dwindles autumn into the cold and soon to be drawn out bitterness of a Pennsylvania winter. Still, as the frisbees were thrown completely out of range of the possibility of catching and I thought of how the experience might be heightened by another child companion for the shortest of us or a sister-of-mine friend for fellow for the more feminine, I looked into the sky, not silver-lining the clouds but more of a masculine pink, were such a color to exist (and oh, it did), content in what the sun, sky and earth were delivering, each of it’s own team-player accord.
A similar good time went on as the night fell heavier than the day, hippies and their frisbees left, dogs and dog owners dwindled but eventually became scarce to none. The shortest, more-smallish of our trio grew restless, and we set out therefor on a moon-hunt. Now, typically a moon hunt, in the more Plains States or African Desert type regions would be a short and easy experience. “Look to the sky, my boy!” would shout a shepherd, nomad or cattle rancher. We, having not spotted such a glowing orb as easily through the sylvan density of our Penn’s woods home and having searched pre-dusk for the mother moon, thought it would be much more exploratory a quest. However, as soon as we had deposited our plasticy waste into the closest bin and turned our heads east, found that giant shiny goodness that was our reason for the season, the Blood Moon. Now, I’m not sure why they call it the blood moon – some theories state that it’s typically a moon set with a ring of crimson around it, others that this is the traditional time for slaughtering the animals that would be salted and preserved for a winter’s meat. Having seen very-little-to-no crimson ring or dripping livestock in the vicinity, I gather it might be more of a drama-queen set stage for the oncoming All Hallow’s Eve.
Regardless of and nevernonemoretheless, we spent the remainder of our night wandering under the glow of that satellite, explaining various theories to eachother, reading plaquards that read of the reasons why medicinal herbs and fragrant flowers and beautiful leaves did what they seemed to do most particularly well. Slowly the night unraveled, from the garden park that we found ourselves in to the cold and man-made stoop that we live above, until the moon kissed a goodnight, promising to be there if we returned before dusk, and we all made our way into bedsheets and the ideas of stocking on our dreaming heads.
Up Next: Wafers and Wine under the Blood Moon