full moon

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Just now, at 4:30, the full moon has moved around to the back of the house, though I doubt the full moon sees it that way. Fall has arrived, with equal amounts of night and day ... I think it was yesterday, but maybe it's today. It's cool, but the forecast is for a day in the 80's -- a summer reprise. October (and its environs), like May (and its environs) is a time when you're not sure whether to keep the windows open or not, whether to take the air conditioner out or not, whether to turn on the furnace or not.

Yesterday, there was a snippet on the news about obesity in China. Once short of goods and food, China is now booming and so is its waist lines. It reminded me of a Russian woman I once met, a language professor in Moscow. During World War II she lived in the Ukraine, the bread basket of the U.S.S.R. But at Stalin's insistence, the food in Ukraine was diverted to other parts of the country: Ukraine had had unacceptable contact with the Nazis and there was retribution to be meted out. Food was very scarce and the woman grew thin together with her fellow Ukrainians.

But once the war was over, there was more food. The hungers of the previous years could be assuaged and the language professor, like others, ate up a storm. She grew fat ... and, at 60 or so when I met her, she still regretted it because before the war she had been an athlete, a track star ... thin and swift as a whippet.

I can still see that sadness on her face ... to have lost the elations of swiftness to something as ordinary and unglorified as eating. It was a rock and a hard place in her life and she felt the pressure and the loss and the regret.

I don't doubt that others have felt a similar regret and a similar yearning for a time when the moon was full ... the same, but different. Time passes and the moon passes with it ... out beyond the back of the house.
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