There wasn’t much chance that I would be awake to see the total eclipse of the blood worm moon, which was visible late last Thursday night or early Friday morning, depending on the time zone. In Nashville the eclipse reached totality at 1:25 a.m., an hour I have not willingly seen since the last time there was a newborn baby in this house.
Besides, storms were on the way. When I stepped outside after supper to see whether setting my alarm made any sense, all I could see of the worm moon was a tiny, lighted patch of sky flashing through a gap between hurrying clouds.
A blood moon lunar eclipse happens when Earth lines up between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow that tints the moon red. During years when March is not offering a total lunar eclipse, the full moon is known as the worm moon. The nicknames for moons — the wolf moon in January, the snow moon in February, etc.— are derived from Native American tradition.
The names varied from tribe to tribe, and European settlers added their own variations, but generally these names represent a natural phenomenon that once tended to occur during that month. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has compiled the full moons’ names and the reasons for them, the worm moon is traditionally a time when earthworms reappear as the soil begins to thaw or — in another telling — when beetle larvae begin to emerge from tree bark.
Many Americans, probably most Americans, are now so divorced from their ecosystems that they have no idea what happens to earthworms during the cold months and even less idea how beetle larvae behave. Continuing to call March’s full moon the worm moon is like calling a shopping center 100 Oaks because it was built in a place that was heavily wooded before someone decided to build a mall there.
Very little on Earth still resembles the planet as it was when the first peoples were naming the full moons. Maybe that’s why I’m in love with these names. I love the way they persist despite our culture’s aversion, if not outright hostility, to the inconvenient natural world. I am always looking for signs of what can yet be preserved. I am especially looking for the people who are working to preserve them.
Last week, when I drove past Elmington Park, I noticed that the Nashville mustard was in full bloom. These tiny yellow flowers, ankle-high on a bare foot, grow only in Middle Tennessee. As soon as I saw them, I pulled over and parked. Taking care not to bother the young couple having a picnic among the flowers, I knelt and bent close. On a still day, their faint scent is a sweetness unlike anything else.
Nashville mustard — a remnant from the days when shortgrass prairie was this area’s primary ecosystem, when the buffalo made their ancient traces through it — is in the midst of a glorious superbloom. Today it grows mainly on public land that is managed by Metro Parks to keep the flowers safe. If they are bulldozed by development, poisoned by lawn chemicals or mowed before the seeds have time to set, these vestiges of a bygone era will be lost forever.
Reading the work of the Nashville naturalist Joanna Brichetto, author of “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” taught me everything I know about Nashville mustard and about how our town has worked to keep it safe. As she writes in a recent blog post: “We are also lucky that Metro Parks does not apply herbicides to their lawns. Park lawns must be tidy, but the older ones are a tidy mosaic of different grasses, sedges, wildflowers (native and not). This is a good model for homeowners: that lawns can be lawns without herbicides.”
Encouraged by the wildflower show at Elmington Park, I set off last week to see as many patches of Nashville mustard as I could find. At a time when losses in the natural world are in hyperdrive for no reason but the shortsighted stupidity of the people who now make this country’s environmental policy, a flower that survives humanity by virtue of the stewardship of others can be a kind of guiding spirit.
The way those yellow flowers lifted my heart may also explain why I set my alarm, despite the cloud cover, to wake in time to see the blood worm moon. That’s the thing about cloud cover: You never know when a break in the clouds will allow a glimpse of something amazing, something that predates us and is yet unruined by human hands. In very dark times, just the barest chance to witness something beautiful is enough to give a person hope.
When the alarm went off at 1:30 a.m., my husband got up to dress, but I threw on my bathrobe and went straight outside.
And there it was. Above the bare trees and the streetlights, above the silent street itself and all the sleeping houses draped in the many nightlights of suburban fear, there it was. The sky was clear, and the moon was tucked high among the clear stars, just as it always is, whether we can see it or not.
But it wasn’t blood red at all. Above our house, at least, it was some other color of red — something like rust and something like the dust of iron ore in a steel mill town. In truth, it was like no other color of red I know. It was the color of something that doesn’t belong to this world.
I stood and looked, marveling in the dark at a wonder that had nothing to do with me, or with any of us. In the sky, it unfolded in its ancient way, untouched by the storms gathering on a wounded planet. A helicopter flew across the sky while I stood there, and then came an airplane on a higher path just behind it, but of course they couldn’t touch the red of that moon, or the moon itself. And there was comfort in that.
A little comfort, anyway.
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