Harvest Moon

Once the farmers would gather to help one another harvest their corn, wheat or cotton, and once a year the moon provided enough light for the workers to continue through the night--hence the name, "harvest moon."

The women would gather to help one farm family, carrying their special covered dishes, working all morning in the kitchen, slicing cakes and pies, making last-minute gravy to feed one-hundred or more. Somebody brought the ice in big blocks from town in a wagon, keeping it covered with straw and blankets, 'til it finally melted in a strong glass of iced tea in the workers' freshly-scrubbed hands. The harvest meant plenty--enough to live on for the winter and spring, until planting time came and the life process began again.

Harvest moon. I remember the song of that name, sung a capela on long warm nights when the grown ups would croon together after picnics in summer or early fall. They would sit for hours, crowded atop wooden picnic tables under pine trees in little parks scattered throughout East Texas, laughing and singing old love songs. . . "For Me and My Gal," " September Song," or "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me." The singers lingered late, until we babes finally stopped ripping through the sandy playground to droop onto Mother's lap and Daddy would finally carry us to the large back seat of the Pontiac.

The park was not far from our house, but nothing was too far from anything in the small town. Little square homes glowed with lamplight in the windows framed with diaphanous Priscilla curtains. Golden spots issued forth from night-tinted violet clapboard--I would wonder who was inside, what they were doing. Always at night the homes seemed peaceful, calm, nurturing, the neighborhoods so quiet that one dog's barking would lead to another's uproar, down the block.

To be able to run free as a child at night, hiding among the trees and calling out to one another through the darkened lawns: what a delightful state of being. Now I look at the sky, the harvest moon stunning, its copper toned face astonishingly grand, and I remember how it once shone onto a different world, in which we exhausted ourselves with few worries or cares.

It is the same moon, bathing us in the same light through the same navy blue skies. Only we have changed during all this time.

Unexamined Lives

September arrived today--hello, old friend, birthday and anniversary month, harbinger of stronger breezes and colors. Time for bag-packing, car-tripping, trail riding, as well as campaign trailing, envelope stuffing, and phones-working. It's back to school for everyone, or hopefully it is.

We're like ants with cell phones, filing in and out of schedules in wavy uncertain lines, following the leaders even if we don't know where they're off to. Destination to be announced, we hardly notice; we're programmed to tag along.

As school children draw outlines of leaves and learn their lessons well, I question the way we teach them, and to what end. I hope we can allow them to decide some things--politics and religion--for themselves within their own family traditions, or according to their own observations of life.

Is it possible any more? Could we respect others' decisions and beliefs? Do we expect them to respect our own?

Back in '85 I overheard a worn out, hungry musician, entering a homeless shelter in time for a bowl of soup, preach the following idea to his neighbor.

"We got to put a little oil on our relationships!" His long fingers clawed the air like dry limbs knocking wildly on a darkened window.

No one else heard--or at least no one reacted to--this declaration, but I've never forgotten it. The man kept on talking, but I walked straight into the kitchen with that idea on my mind: of lubricating the joints where I leave off and other people begin.

Boundaries, deferences, and certain social hesitances, grow between us like ancient hedgerows. . . preventing our personalities, privacy and dignity from blending uncontrollably with those of others. We need those boundaries in order to preserve what is ours, and to make our own paths strong, according to our own decisions.

But tolerance--allowing others to be themselves, to live among us peaceably, to grow and to love--represents most assuredly a sign of advanced civilization.

Can we manage to face ourselves as September wafts into the windows? To assess where and who we really are? To alter ourselves while we can still think on our own, in the midst of whirling propaganda so powerful it threatens to sweep to the skies all that we know?

"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates announced during his trial for heresy. He would have preferred to die rather than to give up his philosophy. Messages come to us from across centuries, across thousands of miles, across cultures and religions and traditions.

We're free to consider these notions, or to bat them away like flies. For such is our right. For the moment.