Under A Strawberry Moon

I am attracted to the line, under a strawberry moon. I want it to mean something. I draw tarot cards at my kitchen table when no one is home. This table was once my grandmother’s art table, a wedding gift when she was young and marrying a man I suspect was not the man she wanted to marry.

I am remembering now, as I say this, that in the hallway closet there is a box, and inside the box there is a case, and inside the case there is a bag, and inside the bag there is a small recording device with my grandmother’s voice on it.

Something is rattling loose in my imagination—or the creative center of my brain—a buzz that I cannot look at directly or I will lose it. Sometimes I think being a writer requires a certain level of necromancy. I have one foot that wears a work boot and one foot bare in the dry grass. It doesn’t work unless you listen, but you can’t listen unless you work. Does that make sense to you?

The strawberry moon is just the name for the full moon in the month of June, and I am in reverence of the way words can make anything romantic. It is meant to signal the shift—the moment just before something is ripe. Someone else tells me that not all ripeness is sweetness. Sometimes it ripens because it must, because the sun has done its work.

On the recording, if you listened to it, you would hear my grandmother and me talking as she told me stories from her years during the Second World War. It was work I did a decade ago for a book I have not written yet. There was subtext in everything she said, a story within the story. And you could hear the clatter of her silver spoon against her coffee cup, the ding of the microwave bacon in the background. And one thing she tells me very plainly: There was a man I loved, but he married someone else, so that is how that goes. There was nothing else to be said on the subject, as far as she was concerned—just that everyone has someone who gets away, even when, or especially if, they were meant to.

I ask my writing students to lean toward radical honesty—the kind that could burn you. There is not a day that goes by when I do not think about and then worry about the boy I used to love in Montana. If I imagine myself as an old woman telling stories about my life—in many, and in some of the best of them, where I am wild and the windows are down—in those, I am in Montana.

I do not know what I am trying to give you only that there is something ripening on the vine.

(this is a picture of me in Montana 3 life’s ago as proof that we were young and wild and filled to the edges with summer.)