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FULL STURGEON MOON – ** TONITE ** 11-AUG-03

 

How did I miss this?  I’ve been entirely wrapped up all evening writing construction specifications for the new house.  I've completely missed moon rise – I think.  I’ll have to go out and check as soon as I post this reminder for the rest of you.

 

I should have remembered earlier today, though.  The kids didn’t sleep well at all last night; they were both up in the middle of the night; that should have tipped me off.  They don’t sleep well just before or just after the full moon.  This was handy when they were babies; I could predict at least once a month when I could be certain I wouldn’t get any sleep!

 

What about you?  Does the full moon affect you or your household?

 

Check your chart at Sky & Telescope to find out when the moon will appear in the sky in your part of the world.  Hope you’ll be having clear skies in your locale!

 

Next month:  Full Harvest Moon on 10-SEP-03 – add this date to your calendar!

 

  9:45:27 PM    comment []

Z

 

The Rose Bush

 

It’s dead.  Withered and brown, not a single shoot survived past the end of May.

 

I’d tried to nurse it along, as I have for the past nine years, since my neighbor took down his picket fence.  A rose bush, planted once inside the corner of his fence, grew in the middle of the lot line between our two houses.  I pruned off dead branches, weeded around its base, gave it rose food each year.

 

This year, only one shoot sprouted in April, when the rest of the rose bushes in our yards also began to emerge from dormancy.  The single shoot disappeared – eaten by bugs or rabbits, leaving nothing behind but an aged, gnarled stump.  It’s a scar now where the lawns meet between our two houses, the result of a hard winter which savaged tender plants.

 

It’s a sign that I try to ignore.

 

For the past thirteen years, we’ve lived in the same house.  We moved in the day after our wedding.  Rushed, trying to juggle the close of our other home and the bustle of a wedding, along with a reception in our new home a few weeks after our move, I didn’t pay much attention to the neighbors.  The neighbors eventually reached out to us.  An older lady who lived kitty-corner across the street introduced herself; we discovered her son had gone to high school with me.  What a small world, we said.  She filled me in about the neighbors who lived on each side of us: the single gentleman to the east was a divorce raising his young daughter; the lady across from him was a divorcee with grown children; the couple across the street had three teenagers, and the gentleman to the west was a widower raising two youngsters on his own.

 

What a coincidence again, I thought.  The two youngsters were a little older and a little younger than my stepson; he would have playmates when he was with us on visitation.  The kitty-corner neighbor continued, pleased to have someone new to ply with gossip.  The children’s mother had died of cancer only the year before; she’d been a teacher at the local high school.  Wow, my high school, I thought; had I met her, I wondered?  I couldn’t recall ever hearing her name.  Sad, to leave behind two young children.

 

Eventually we met the children and their father; the children were charming, well-behaved, well-mannered; the father, a fuddy-duddy man who seemed too old to have children this age.  My stepson got on well with them; it was a blessing, making moving to this neighborhood less stressful for him as well as for us.

 

A picket fence surrounded their backyard.  The boys ran into it frequently while playing football, breaking pickets on occasion; the fence was well over 15 years old and beginning to rot.  Eventually our neighbor took it down altogether.

 

The rose bush was revealed.

 

It wasn’t a picky one, covered with thorns; it was a multiflora, covered with simple pink blooms for the duration of the summer.  I’d never noticed it before, shrouded by the fence as it was; now it demanded attention, being the only feature in between the two yards.  Perhaps I’d never noticed it before because it was rather small; it was only knee-high the year that the fence was removed.

 

The following spring the rose bush appeared worse for wear; perhaps it was because it was out in the open without protection from the wind.  Or perhaps it was because my neighbor wasn’t exactly proficient at yard maintenance; he was bookish, a librarian by profession, and absorbed with the children and indoors most of the time.  I asked his boy whether his father would mind if I pruned back some of the dead branches and gave it some rose food; I would be doing the same for my own roses, it would be no great trouble.  He said he was sure his father wouldn’t mind if I took care of his mother’s rose bush.  It had been a present to her several years before she died.

 

Oh…okay, I said.  I’ll take good care of it, I promised him.  I didn’t not know what else to say about caring for his dead mother’s rose; what does one say to a child of ten scant years about their mother or their mother’s rose, after all?

 

The next time I worked in the yard, I pruned the bush carefully, removing all the old rose hips from the previous year and cutting away the winter-burned branches.  The weeds around the base of the shrub were pulled, the soil spaded, fertilizer added.  I wondered what the

 

The rose bush erupted in a frenzy of blooms, a drift of pink petals and masses of blossoms all summer.  The rose hips were brilliant red, thickly clustered and glossy.  I felt more than adequately compensated for the small amount of effort I put into it.  It was a beautiful plant.

 

The children next door grew apace with the rosebush, as did my stepson.  They’ve all gone to college now, and in my stepson’s case, into the Armed Forces.  We’ve adopted them, in some sense; they and their father have been invited regularly for holiday meals and festive occasions.  We don’t always see both of the children; the daughter now has a full-time job and is working on a Master’s degree program.  The son is home during the summer, but takes a job while at home.  The father is outside less and less.  But I guess that’s to be expected with his health.

 

The widower has a heart problem that’s made him frail.  Actually, he always seemed rather frail, but now more so since he was hospitalized two years ago.  His daughter left school for a semester to nurse him back to health; it was rather awkward for her since she was only in her early twenties and eager to finish school.  She was raised with an overwhelming sense of duty, though; she was compelled to be here until she was absolutely certain her father would be fine on his own.  At seventy-one years of age, it wasn’t unthinkable that her father might not be able to care for himself on his own.

 

I’m not certain that their differences didn’t contribute to the speed of his recovery.  She had been a good and dutiful daughter all her life, and now wanted to exercise some of the freedoms she’d acquired while at college.  She dated, came home later than her father felt was reasonable.  She’d taken to wearing pants, which her staunchly conservative Baptist father found objectionable.  Eventually, she had to go back to school.  I’m sure it was not only because her father was much better.

 

We had several heart-to-heart talks while she’d been home on break.  On more than one occasion, she literally dumped about her situation.  Her father belittled her constantly.  She was suffocating at home, stifled by a man who was old enough to be her grandparent, without a mother to help her through this time of trial and growth.  I tried to offer what advice I could, limited by respect for her father’s faith.  How sad and difficult it must have been, to be raised by this insular, lonely man, without any female family member nearby to help.  I wondered what her mother would say, while trying only to validate what this poor young woman was feeling.  During one such chat, I couldn’t help it; I let it slip and said so.  What would your mother think, what would she have said?

 

It was as if a dam broke.  My young friend told me her mother was much younger than her father, and in her father’s eyes, a bit of a rebel.  There had been a history of verbal abuse between this older man and his younger wife, and at one point, nearly a separation.  Before her death, her mother had expressed her concerns to her own family about her husband’s ability to care for the children she would be leaving behind; she was concerned about abuse.

 

Oh my God, I said, you need nothing from me.  Your mother has already spoken.  You need to leave and return to your life and pay heed to your own counsel, listen to your heart.  I couldn’t help it, I spat it out; it wouldn’t stay in.  She’d needed only the validation that another mother could offer, that a mother would feel this concern, would want a daughter to leave such circumstances.  I told her I would expect the same of my own daughter were she in the same situation.  Leave, go on with your life.  You’ve done your duty above and beyond the call.  You do not deserve to be abused.  Your mother would surely not want this for you.

 

She packed up within the month and returned to school.  I was sad to see her go, yet happy that she was free again. 

 

Another autumn came and went as well, another passing of blooms to rosehips to snow.  This summer’s blossoms had been thin, the rosehips were much fewer still.

 

Thanksgiving arrived, and the now-elderly neighbor joined us for dinner; he seemed to have aged a decade since summer.  We had a nice visit as in holidays past, but I could not help wonder what went on behind those heavy glasses, under the thinning grayed hair.  Did he know at all what his daughter had told me, did he ken at all my concerns for her?  It never showed.

 

Christmas followed, and both the children came home on break.  The son, a strapping young man, had started college this season.  His sister had completed her last semester and would start her Master’s program after the holidays.  They joined us for a holiday feast again, all of us making friendly, polite talk.  The daughter took me aside at one point and asked if we could get together for coffee and girl talk.  Certainly, any time, I told her.

 

It wasn’t what I’d expected at all, what she had to tell me.  She’d fallen in love, wanted to marry a young doctoral student.  She’d met his mother already.  They were happy, ecstatic together.  And her father would not be able to handle this at all.  Not because of the happiness, not because of the love – but because this young man with whom she was so smitten was Asian.  Not Anglo-white like her.

 

They’d known each other for a long time, having gone to the same Baptist college together.  They had been good friends first, before falling in love.  And now?  How could she marry him if her father wouldn’t grant his permission, wouldn’t give his blessing?  What would become of her if she were to give up her love simply because her father was bigoted?  Her father had already been furious with her, her brother equally unsupportive over this relationship.  What would happen if she lost the approval of the family she had left? 

 

She’d already risked much by being involved with this young Asian man, on a campus that had only recently allowed inter-racial relationships.  She was breaking ground, exposing herself and her family to pressure from those who still have it otherwise.

 

I’d already crossed the line separating neighbors and friends when I told her before that she should leave abuse behind.  This was beyond the pale for me; I could not let this go as a friend.  I asked her what she thought of me.  Was I somehow intrinsically bad, the outcome of sin?  I am, after all, the product of two people of different races, white and Asian-Polynesian.  Was I inherently bad, were my siblings and now my children as evil too?

 

What comes of miscegenation was entirely different, now that she could put a face on it.   It’d seemed only like a battle of ethics, a battle of cultures, nothing but semantics.  Now, embodied and substantiated, it was something different altogether.  I could see it in her face as she wrestled with this conflict.  This was no longer me, a neighbor, giving second-party advice contradictory to her father’s advice.  This was me, a friend, asking her personally if I was somehow less human, invalidated, by the beliefs in which she was raised.  This was me, a neighboring friend who’d watched her grow up, asking if her father’s racism was acceptable to her.

 

We talked a lot about this, by email and in person while she was home again on Spring Break.  I’d sent her a book about verbal abuse, to help her weed out what was reasonable and what was not.  I’d even asked my own mother what she’d thought about this situation, since she’d confronted this same attitude in her own lifetime.  My mother said, Tell her to take her time, make her life on her own terms, that time would take care of the conflicts.  I agreed.  And I wonder too, what her own mother would have felt and said.  Would she have wanted her daughter to be this miserable?  Would she have expected her to suffer so, for the sake of making a bigoted man happy, even if it was her father?  Was her mother so bigoted too, that she would have demanded the same heartbreak of her daughter?  I cannot believe that any mother would do this to their child; if she has doubts, she should ask her mother’s family what they think her mother would have felt.

 

I conveyed these sentiments to my young friend; I think she’s taking it to heart, think she’s finally able listen to her mother’s voice from that quiet place beyond.  She’d made peace with her brother after they’d sought counseling at school together.  She’d made plans to introduce her young man to her mother’s family; they’d long been supportive of her.  I hope they still are.  I should send an email to her and find out how it went when they visited with them this summer.  It won’t matter now, though, if I find out.  I believe I did the right thing by her, and that will have to be enough.

 

And yet nothing will be quite the same, right thing or no.  We are preparing to leave this house for a new one, making plans to build another home.  Will my young friend still find her way to our home to visit and tell me that she survived my advice?  Will her father be okay without us watching from next door, in spite of his slow but continuing decline?  Will we all of us be able to manage what guilt might come of whatever happens in the near future?  Who can say?

 

The rose bush no longer needs my care now; we’ll have to tidy up by removing the stump before we sell this house.  I will think of it, though, think of that other mother and her daughter when I plant a rose bush at my new home.  If I’m invited to her wedding in the future, I know what I will buy them.  A pink multi-flora rose bush.

 

  2:02:53 PM    comment []