As I back out of the garage and pull the car toward the woods I see her, shining full circle, white as alabaster behind the bare trees that stand like soldiers guarding her, the top branches spidery against the moonlit sky. She lights up their silhouette.
I put the car in drive and look forward through more trees stripped of their greenery like a storefront mannequin stripped of its clothes, seeming to shiver in the bitter cold, fencing the yard. Beyond them is an unusual beginning to sunrise – on the horizon before me, over the mountain ridges, horizontal lines of blues, purples and grays, layer like a cake. The color is so different from what is normal at this time of day in mid-winter. So often the tips of the trees in our yard seem to stand like little candles above the mountain ridge iced with colors of orange and pink and red – a mingling of color that I cannot identify. But the colors on this morning do not exude such fiery energy; they are colors of cool and calm, the product of the full moon in a clear sky.
The morning is still as I pass down our steep driveway and into the neighborhood. Some crunchy ice lines the road, snow coats the grass, everything looks black and white as a checkerboard.
As I pull onto the freeway, she greets me with a force that makes me want to stop the car. The moon, she is so bright – white with a yellow halo – that her craters are fully visible. She lights up a midnight blue sky. There are no other cars on the road. Just me and the moon. As I drive toward Brownsville and the Historic Church of St. Peter, where I play the organ, the sky lightens to ocean blue, and the moon continues to command the scene before me. When I get to my exit, I do not want to leave her. Today the sun will eat away the snow. The ground will be raw and black. The moon will start to lose its full luster.
At the church I park “outside the lines” on the pavement, unable to see well in the morning dusk. As I make my way down the hill, I look over the cemetery that flanks the church; graves of Revolutionary and Civil war soldiers sit amidst the grander tombstones of priests and wealthy parishioners. As I make my way toward the church, I get one last glimpse of the moon sitting beside the green copper Gothic steeple. The church sits high on a hill overlooking Brownsville, the Monongahela River and Route 40; it is believed that the Catholic Irish immigrants who built St. Peter’s wanted their church to sit above the many others in the town, wanted it to be seen from every angle entering Brownsville. I stand in the parking lot and look. The only other person there is an usher. “It’s beautiful isn’t it,” he says in a hushed voice. There are no cars on Route 40. Stillness blankets the earth.
I shiver in the tomblike cold of the old stone church as I climb the narrow stone turret to the organ and choir loft. Before Mass begins, I play hymns about light because that is the theme of the gospel – salt and the light that pierced the darkness.
I often find myself stuck in the gap between black of night and the hallelujah of a sunrise. Don’t we all get stuck there, unsure if we should remain hidden in the shadows of the night or embrace the light that is beckoning to us. Our hope hides behind the haze. We keep checking the sky, anticipating that at some point the clouds will clear. But sometimes the epiphany of purpose we seek remains clouded. Sometimes we shrink into that gap between dark and light because it is safe there. We don’t have to go back to the things that hurt us, and we don’t have to move forward, afraid that our flaws, our failures will be glaringly obvious in the sunlight. I lack the courage to take risks, generally allowing myself to rest in the shadows. I have sought purpose for a long time, not understood what was meant for me. I have traveled the road back and forth, back and forth, again and again and again seeking what gift I had to give this place, this landscape that was defined by revolutionists and immigrants.
The moon in her brilliance beckons me to allow a beam to break the night of my heart. She reminds me that our repetitive passage over the road can only be made sure by the places that we stop along it, that I need to spend less time thinking about what I am doing here and more time thinking about how can I serve here? How can I be a part of the landscape rather than just moving back and forth on it? How can I stop in the road to view the moons of my life, the sites that must be seen now before they disappear?
This moon that I see on this February morning is a Snow moon. It isn’t as brilliant as the Wolf Moon, the first full moon of 2023 which appeared on January 6, my 58th birthday. Astrologists say these moons named for howling wolves and drifting snows are supposed to cause me deep reflection and an unfiltered view of myself, that a purple sky signifies a spiritual awakening. In the Bible and in many churches purple represents royalty, priesthood and wealth. We look for signs – full moons, purple skies, other things in nature that really have nothing at all to do with our lives and our decisions. We look for road signs to guide us, mile markers to help us to see the length until the end.
My journey to find myself, to reclaim the person who seems to have receded in the shadows of a moonless sky, has been one of exterior exploration and interior roadwork. I have looked back on the roads of southwestern Pennsylvania where I have lived my entire life for grounding and guidance, and I have looked forward for possible routes of escape. What I have found is a permanent mapping that will always ground me here. Like the moon mirrors the sun, I find answers in my reflection.
Casteel, Beth
Nonfiction
Published in Northern Appalachia Review, Volume 5, 2024
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