on goodnights

On our way home from Wappinger’s Falls Saturday night, twisting down the Taconic, I watched out the window as the moon, ducking in and out of the trees, on her* side, half in the dark, followed us.

When I was 13, I went to sleep away camp for a week.  Just a week, seven days, and yet I acted like it was a year, crying into my sleeping bag that first night as if I would never see my parents again.  On the third day I received a letter from my Dad.  I still remember the novelty of it, Dad, writing me a letter from all of 20 miles away, to say hello.  He wrote that he thought of me the night before as he was walking the dog, and looking up at the moon he said goodnight by it, and told me to do the same, to think of it as a telephone of sorts.  In the bunk hours later, I found the moon through the slats in the roof and, whispering goodnights in some Walton-esque fashion, I ran through the list of people I loved.

And so Saturday night, on our way back to the city after a few hours with the sisters and old friends, I thought of everyone I still have, and I said goodnight to them by her.

*I’m not trying to be all hippy dippy here, but the moon in my book is most definitely not an “it”. It has to be something more than that and since I never believed in the man in the moon (surely it’s a woman’s face up there) that brings me to “her”.