What the Moon Knows

Heidi Naylor

My mother crouched to anchor canvas dams in the cold ditch, mud on her skinny shins and elbows, and talked to God as she walked home on the old field road beneath a full buck moon.

My father found his younger brother in the pool hall rather than collar him home he fostered a gentle evolution of love even now crossing oceans to bridge estrangement in a plane traversing the moon.

My mother traded birthdays with her toddler brother so she could have a party kids could actually come to well outside of spud harvest in the light of a strawberry moon.

My father hid in the barn with a pound of home-churned butter packed in a tin mug and scooped up, scraped out, schlurped down; for years after he couldn’t touch the stuff pale and cool and slippery good, the color of a glory moon.

My friend divorced so early a smattering of betrayals human and cosmic but watch her laugh—survival!—to tell how the night the papers were signed she pulled up to a Friday red light

next a wobbling, blaring Volkswagen of Mad Youths who smushed up to the window their moons.

I mean, she says, it was pretty funny.