The Night the Moon Touched the Ground

        

It was just another ordinary fall evening. A friend had been visiting our farm having come up to give us a hand with some renovations before winter set it. She always enjoyed her stays with us, and we enjoyed her skillful carpentry and great company. Living as far north as we did, visitors from our former life down south were rare to non-existent. So Pearl’s 400 plus mile trek to our place in northern Alberta was more than appreciated.

While we kept on with hauling hay and combining grain in the face of fast approaching winter, Pearl refurbished the outside of the old house we lived in. It had been one of the first in the district we’d been told, the living room often used as a courtroom when local behavior deemed such decision making processes necessary. I still remember the first land tax notice we received. The home place acreage where the barn and house were located was worth less than a similarly sized parcel of crop land. I laughed and asked my mate if he thought the home actually lessened the value of that piece of land. It was serviceable but old indeed.

On the particular day in question, Pearl had finished a new set of stairs leading to the closed-in porch. She was testing them out, sitting on the top one having her afternoon coffee and cigarette. Since we didn’t smoke, she never smoked in our house. She was always respectful that way. I had just come in from hauling hay ready to start evening chores. I had a cow to milk, chickens to feed and sheep to bring close in for the coming night before we sat down to eat. The days were already shortening, so I hurried along to get chores done. A beautiful sunset was stretching out across this big sky country in shades of mauve and burnt orange and the air had a nip to it reminding me of what was soon to come.

When supper was over, Fred went out to his shop to work on some equipment repairs, I was separating cream and making butter and Pearl took her coffee out into the brisk evening to once again sit on her new stairs, relax and have a smoke. She had been out there about 20 minutes when all of a sudden, I heard the door open quickly and her whispering voice, tinged with alarm saying, “Christina, come out here – quick.” I was in the middle of washing the separator, but I stopped, and began to dry my hands on a tea towel. Her head poked in the door this time and she was even more insistent. “Hurry!” 

There was a definite look of fear in her eyes. I wiped any leftover water on my jeans and jumped into my wellingtons. I came out the door and turned to the east where she pointed. “What is that?” she asked, pointing perhaps 80 yards away toward the end of the barnyard. She was standing behind me as one does when they feel the need for protection. I was standing stock still in awe of what stood before me. 

“Pearl” I said over my shoulder, “what are you smoking?” Then I giggled.

She was in no mood for humor. “What is that?” She was dead serious.

“Pearl, that’s the moon.”

“No,” she countered.

“Yes it is.”

Before us sat a huge orange ball. It appeared to be two to three stories tall in diameter. It looked like it was sitting smack on the ground, as if you could walk right up to it and touch it. It was a sight I will remember the rest of my days.

I turned to Pearl who still looked a bit disbelieving and asked, “What did you think it was?”

“A UFO or something.”

I laughed softly and said something about damned city-slickers, and then I gave her a hug. We both laughed like young girls sharing yet another secret of life as we watched it all too quickly begin to seemingly shrink and rise.

I have felt since a child that the great tracts of nature are an ongoing gift to us humans. They stand just at the end of our lanes, just out beyond our back yards or in my case, at that time, just where civilization melts into wilderness; and there they are. In the words of Wallace Stegner:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”

And that wild country includes not just what is on the ground with us but the alluring, incalculable vastness of what also lies above us, especially on nights when it appears to have come for a visit.

Here’s what one such “moon visit” looked like in Wellington, New Zealand. Do take a peek.

https://vimeo.com/58385453    

How Do They Know These Things

by Christina Carson

I can understand them relishing the suet and the cracked corn, fat and grain being natural components of their diet, but unshelled peanuts… How does a grackle know about unshelled peanuts? Yes, I know they are rather opportunistic when it comes to food, but unshelled peanuts can be tough for me to open, so I never imagined they would take them on. We had originally put a few peanuts out each day for the small group of squirrels that share the backyard with us. Then the blue jays spotted the peanuts. They wrestled with them a bit, seeming to test them for which opened easily. Next thing I knew the blue jays has learned to soak the difficult shells in the birth bath. It was about that time, I noticed the grackles snatching peanuts and doing the same thing.

Several winters back, I bought my husband a nuthatch feeder, one where the suet block is on the bottom side and the nuthatch lands in his favorite position of upside down. We watched the sparrows and chickadees watch the nuthatch, and lo and behold very soon, the sparrows and chickadees had learned how to land upside down on the nuthatch feeder. They reminded me of kids playing double dare down. They didn’t appear to feel the need to remain true to the stories we’d written about them.

Even funnier than that was an incident back in my shepherding days. To say I was as amateur when we started would have been kind. I had so little eye for sheep that I couldn’t tell one white sheep from another. Even the tiniest of spots was sufficient to get a ewe a name. Spottie had one black dot on her face and was one of the first to introduce herself. She came up to me, stuck her nose in my face as if she were nearsighted and sniffed her way across my cheeks. I guess I passed muster for we soon became friends. But the day she stole the banana peel, that was a poser. I was sitting in the pasture finishing off a banana and had the peel dangling from my fingers between my knees. I wasn’t paying attention to anything in particular until I noticed Spottie coming through the flock like a determined old shopper on $1.49 Day. She cut a swath right through her fellow females, whipped up to me, grabbed the banana peel out of my hand and kept on trucking. Now you tell me where a sheep of the northern climes comes to know about bananas.

And finally there was the weasel that lived in the nearby bush but “moused” the dairy barn for us on a regular basis. Mind you, I was not at all pleased when he shifted his diet late one spring to baby chicks and killed 49 of the 50 I was rearing, carrying each one back to the bush and neatly arranging them in some old tin cans he’d found out there. But one day when I was milking, he came in, dove down a mouse hole, came up with mouse and left. After about his third trip, curious, I went to the door to see where he was going. Our huge Komondor, Dali, was snoozing outside the back of the barn with her head resting on the skid the building sat on. The weasel ran down the skid, right over top of Dali’s snout and then shot around the side of the building and into the bush. Her head snapped up, then she leapt up and gave chase, but the weasel was long gone. Then the cheeky little beggar, just as Dali had gotten settled back down, came from the opposite direction, back over her snout and into the milking barn. Three times more he did this, and I think the last time, when she didn’t leap up but merely followed him with her eyes it was because she was as incredulous as I was. We’re talking about an eight inch weasel and a 130 pound livestock guard dog.

I believe I enjoy the animal kingdom so thoroughly because no matter where they find themselves, wild in the bush, fenced in a pasture or resident in a small back yard, it never appears to occur to them not to have fun. Ease and enjoyment is what they know with a spontaneity that thrills me. I am not sure why we see life so differently, but I do know that what one believes, one becomes. So I choose my friends more carefully these days. And since I no longer have the bush or a pasture, you’re likely to find me sitting on my back steps amongst our extended family of birds, chipmunks and squirrels. For if I am going to cultivate any beliefs at this point in my life, I want it to be theirs.

Christina Carson, Author

The Importance of Forgetting

by Christina Carson

It’s the edge of summer and it always reminds me of that glorious last day of school, when you awoke the next morning knowing you could walk out that door into a world that asked nothing of you but to be back by lunch and later supper. And in the months that followed, you could forget the feel of walls, shouts of “don’t run” in the halls and rooms without window, as the rest of your senses opened to their own beautiful memories of bird song, brook babble and flower scent. You could remember the wind not as a breeze from an air vent but a friend that brought you messages of the world around you. And best of all, you could forget a world made rigid with man’s construction—times tables, drawing between the lines, and sitting still— to return to a world throbbing and real at every turn. I think the forgetting was the most healing part.

Strangely, as adults we find ourselves in the same conundrum as when we were school age kids. You’d think we’d learn. Instead, we confine ourselves now not only by a different set of walls but also a sense of unending duty. Years ago, while sitting with a native about my same age, we talked of his fears, how he wanted, nay, needed to be able to return to his people’s original way of life if he was ever going to be able to rekindle within him a sense of peace and harmony. If he could not live in that manner, free from the modern world’s rigidity of form and regulations, he felt it would be lost to him forever. As he spoke, I could feel the panic arising in me, for I’d told myself that I could find my way back to awareness of our true nature no matter what. To imagine otherwise felt like some cruel trick the universe had played on us. I remember saying to him at the time how that just couldn’t be so, but doubt was now nibbling at my trust.

Years later I understood what he was trying to tell me, however. One must have something in their lives that’s real, thus renewing

— a realm where truth lives and washes you clear of the fabrications you experience inside the walls. Our childhood time spent racing barefoot across the fields, wading in the brooks, looking for what lived in every crack and cranny and making friends with it had a unique value. For only there did we consistently find life without puffery, deception or meanness; only there did we see harmony along with playfulness, simplicity amidst the luxurious beauty. As Mary Oliver remembers in her poem, “Just as the Calendar Began to Say Summer:”

…By fall I had healed somewhat, but was summoned back
to the chalky rooms and the desks, to sit and remember
the way the river kept rolling its pebbles,
the way the wild wrens sang though they hadn’t a penny in the bank,

and the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

She too knew how we could carry those memories a long way and an even longer time and how they keep us clear about what matters. 

Find a pocket of quiet. Slip your shoes and socks off and walk through grass somewhere. Then plop down and sit just listening and watching until your breathing slows and your shoulders drop. What matters then? Forget the rest.

Christina Carson, Author

New novel now available on Amazon.

Accidents of Birth Trilogy Summary

The greatest influence in setting the course of anyone’s destiny is the family into which they’re born. What we’re taught to believe, what is asked of us, the burdens we’re given, the lies we share all start there. Through the eyes of an illiterate, Black housekeeper, Imogene Ware, born in 1928 in the post-Civil War enclave of Small Town in rural Mississippi, we get to view the last half of the racially charged, politically divisive 20th century through her eyes. Quirky, gritty and acutely discerning, Miss Imogene fights to save her own children and the white Sutton children in her charge from the happenstance of their births, all the while honoring her mother’s deathbed behest, a mandate to love the world.

Book One: Where It Began

from the Accidents of Birth Trilogy

Book One of the Accidents of Birth Trilogy introduces the protagonist, Imogene Ware, an illiterate Black housekeeper, whose insightful yet quirky nature has her carry on conversations as fluidly with her cart horse, Polly, as she does with God. Having accompanied her mother to the Sutton household since Imogene was 10 years old, she thinks she has learned the job sufficient to carry on when her mother is taken ill and dies. What she didn’t notice in those years of training, however, was that not only must she keep house, but also withstand the tides of the emotional storms that wash through the Sutton family. This first book covers ten years (1956-1966) of Miss Imogene’s initiation into life without her mother and into domestic circumstances she never imagined, all the while watching the world outside the Sutton household being rocked by racial unrest that is now touching even her isolated corner of rural Mississippi.

Great story with a loving and moral heart – Author Patricia Zick

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