At night, when the moon is out, a woman’s mind races: the mundane, the painful, & the glorious.
Words by Elissa Altman | Illustration by Courtney Garvin
July 24, 2024
It is 3 o’clock in the morning, I am lying in bed reading on my phone, and this word pops up in my feed: petrichor.
I understand algorithmic functions, which do not differ tremendously from the old college exam questions of my 1970s youth: X is to Y just as A is to B. If you like this, you will like that. So if I am reading the first few lines of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland while my wife snores next to me — The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree. Late-summer heatwave, heavy air. Bees browsing drowsy over meadow grass. — this word for the smell of the earth after a rainstorm will arrive unbidden on the tiny screen along with its derivation and root: petrichor. The word comes from the Greek petra, for stone, and ichor, which in Greek mythology refers to the ethereal fluid that flows in the veins of the gods.
Chronic insomnia since I was a child. A cyclonic brain that will not rest, that is always ready to run, to keep moving; a gift of epigenetics. On this night, I am kept awake by the emotionally violent work of long-term eldercare for a mentally ill mother, by the news of babies and more babies dying thousands of miles away, by the cortisol-drenched shame of relapse. An earworm, and I begin to hum that old Cat Stevens line where do the children play. Politics; the visceral, cellular body memory of so many women like me who survived and prevailed over sweating, polyester-clad monsters who visited us in our pink shag-rug bedrooms late at night, only to have one in possession of the nuclear codes. A week earlier, a close friend visited from New Orleans; I heard myself asking him, in a frightened voice I did not recognize, not to walk the dog while wearing his Saints hoodie, because we have a neighbor who patrols our street in a white SUV, slowing down behind anyone he doesn’t know. My brain downshifts: Will my cousin explain the complicated problem of clothing selection to her 3-year-old little boy, who is a child of color? The house is falling down around us: The freezer door handle is duct-taped in place, and the oven door won’t open the whole way, limiting the size of the ham we can buy for Sunday dinner. The wife had knee surgery; the ancient dog won’t stop coughing. Two friends, women, have deadly cancers, and another, a neurodegenerative disease that will certainly kill her; a chef who stands on her feet all day and works with her hands, she can no longer turn her head or chop an onion. My test results came back yesterday and my doctor, a renowned New York City bigshot, ignored a marker of mine for years, and now my bones are soft; I fired her. The tax bill arrived.
I read Macfarlane’s words again, line by line, and then, in the middle of the night, while I’m thinking of the myth of safety — danger is everywhere and anywhere, suddenly and always, for women, for children, for all of us in the most mundane of places — the algorithm delivers the next words:
Hiraeth: An earnest longing for a place or a home that no longer exists or perhaps never did. Welsh; no direct English translation.
Philocaly: The love of beauty. Ancient Greek, from philos, love of, and kállos, beauty.
Selenophile: Derived from the Greek selēnē, meaning moon, and philia, for love. A selenophile is one who loves and is moved by the moon.
I put my phone down and look out the window into the suburban dark.
I can’t sleep; I am intrigued; we are definitely selenophiles. My wife and I are both Cancerians, deeply affected by lunar phases. At 3:45, I decide that it is genetic; my father was a night fighter pilot during the Second World War, who navigated by the moon and the stars.
If you find yourself lost, he told me, look up.
Is it possible, I type into the notes app on my phone, to find myself lost. Can one find oneself lost.
It is almost 4; I hear the birds.
The cardinals are the first to sing.
On a clear night in 2020, two months after our pandemic lockdown began and halfway into my estranged mother’s four-month stay at our home, I stepped outside onto my front porch and noticed an emerald-green male luna moth sitting motionless near the bottom of the cherry door frame. I left my wife and my mother inside drinking spigot wine with Peggy Lee on the turntable singing “Fever”; I sat down on the top step and leaned in close to it. The moth didn’t flutter, or fly away; for a moment, I worried that he had died in the way that Isabella tiger moths do in the chill of early autumn, when the temperature drops precipitously and they become immobile, their wings fluttering slower and slower, and then, not at all. But it was warm that May night and the luna moth was very much alive; we sat together in stillness for what felt like hours. I could hear my mother and Peggy singing through the window screen behind me: Sun lights up the daytime / Moon lights up the night. I was watching him; he seemed to be watching me. I wondered if he could hear the music, and I wondered what he made of it.
When I let the dog out early the next morning, he was gone, and I somehow wept like a fool from the depths of my heart to know that Actias luna live only a week after emerging from the cocoon, this magnificent creature of myth and promise of transformation and healing who had appeared on my door frame like a mezuzah, blessing all who enter. Phalena plumata caudata — Latin for brilliant feather tail — was the first North American silk moth to appear in writings about insects, in 1700. It was here long before Homo sapiens walked upright; it was here before the wars and the disease. It will be here long after we’ve gone, compelled by the light of the moon. Selenophiles, every one of them.
A week later, the bees returned to our property as the Covid fatalities increased and 20 mostly older people I knew died swiftly while their children said goodbye to their matriarchs on FaceTime; the bees were followed by a profusion of hummingbirds who assaulted each other in front of the living room window as if it were the skies over Belgium. The massive great horned owls that we never see and only faintly hear sat on the lower branches of our maple trees, catching chipmunks and mice and fisher cats whose numbers in past years had begun to dwindle because of the amount of poison sprayed on local lawns, shrubs, and flowers; with a pandemic that kept my neighbors out of garden centers, so many of the beasts returned, and I swore to anyone who might have been listening that I would never, not ever, introduce glyphosate to my property or my groundwater or my perennial or vegetable gardens, not even a year later, when Asian bittersweet began to climb and choke everything in its path, including the 500-year-old oak one street over that managed to survive some stoned kids spray-painting it with the words FUCK YU on its trunk in black just above a knothole that a local arborist said was from a diseased limb that dropped during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.
I pull the bittersweet off by hand every time I pass the tree while walking the dog; sometimes I carry Felco pruners in my back pocket for when the vine gets too thick. I refuse to lose the tree to either poison or a vine that has a goal to destroy what is healthy and breathing. Walking home after hearing of my friends’ diagnoses, the three of them in succession, I remember that they, all of them, are organic eaters and gardeners and yoga-doers and meditators, one of them a devout Catholic and the other a Presbyterian who reads the Book of Common Order every day, and the third, for two decades, a vegetarian and Buddhist priest. Are we kidding ourselves, trying to control the inevitable? To control destiny? I knew the grandmother of one of my ill friends; she lived to 102 years old and had a cigarette and two fingers of good bourbon, neat, no more, no less, every night before dinner. She survived a revolution and two world wars and starvation and the loss of her son. The doctor told her to stop with the cigarettes and the bourbon; she called him a jackass.
The algorithmic principle: X is to Y just as A is to B. Correlation; cause and effect. The worse the news gets, the less I sleep and the more I cook. Like my grandmother and her mother before her, I stand in the kitchen with my aching back, listening to the radio, my hands in a yellowware bowl; I leave my rings on as instructed when I was a child by the older women in my life, to be caked with the dough of sustenance and sorrow, and worn to the grave as representative of the quiet and holy immensity of one’s life. I awaken the now 4-year-old sourdough rye starter even though I am not supposed to eat bread anymore because my glucose is high; it smells like turpentine, which the fermentation professionals tell me means it needs to be fed. The bombs drop; relief workers die while bringing food to starving civilians; I make the bread and give it away. I play my guitars quietly, sitting on the front porch near where the luna moth perched; I play just for me, a song I wrote years ago in D, the key of light and possibility. I order the vegetable seeds; I skip the tomatoes this year because of blight. I replace the bird feeders that have been ravaged by deer and the wrought iron shepherd’s crook that was bent to the ground by an adult black bear as if it were made of rubber; if we cleared enough of the wooded area behind our house, we could plant a grove of fruit trees the way naturalist Diane Ackerman did for the deer on her Ithaca, New York, property, believing that if they had enough sweetness to eat, they would leave her garden alone. A benediction of deer, she called them in Cultivating Delight; gardening is a contract with hope, even when its riches are shared with another species. I spend extra money on the better suet and a new glass bottle for the hummingbirds, who will be early this year; May birds, they will arrive in April because of climate change. I order selenophilic flowers that love the moon, that will shimmer beneath the waxing and waning gibbous.
I read words on a tiny screen at 3 in the morning, and the algorithm presents correlatives. Petrichor, hiraeth, philocaly, selenophile. Ikigai.
Ikigai: Reason to live, from the Japanese iki, to live, and gai, reason; no direct English translation. Living with purpose and mission; service.
My wife sleeps soundly; on a shelf next to my side of the bed is a black-and-white photo of my long-dead grandmother, a classical pianist stone deaf for years, laying both hands on a nephew’s shining black Steinway upright. I recall the afternoon it was taken in 1990: At 93, having fled the violence of Europe almost a century earlier, she played a C chord and declared the piano in need of a tuning simply based on its vibration. My phone buzzes. A news notification interrupts my memory: It has been discovered that butterflies drink the tears of turtles.
An old woman with no hearing plays a C chord on a piano and can tell by putting her hands on the gleaming ebony that it needs to be tuned; butterflies drink the tears of turtles. Moon-loving flowers will glow in the perennial garden. The starter will be awakened and erupt like Vesuvius after sleeping for almost four years.
Correlation: This lives and that dies. This grows and that burns. A light here requires a shadow there.*
What I fear most is despair / for the world and us: forever less / of beauty, silence, open air, / gratitude, unbidden happiness, / affection, unegotistical desire wrote Wendell Berry in his Sabbath Poems.
Ikigai: the mundane that sustains and feeds us, feeds me, while we find ourselves lost, and the world smolders and shines. ◊
Elissa Altman is an award-winning author of literary memoir, essay, and food narrative. She launched her James Beard Award-winning narrative food blog, Poor Man’s Feast, in 2008. Her books include Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking; Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw; and Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing.
Courtney Garvin is an Atlanta-based designer specializing in branding and design strategy. She received a MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University and a BFA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design.