Worm Moon

For a long time it just so happened that I ended up out and about and looking at the March full moon, and then after a while I noticed the March moon had a special feel to it, and so now every year I make sure I check when it’s happening and go out and see it. 

It’s called the Worm Moon. I like that name. It’s honest and gross like mouths and rotting vegetables and grime in the grout. 

Last night I went for a walk and it was cloudy at first but the wind was high and swept the clouds off the edge of the sky and over the lip of the pile the Worm Moon slid up. Crisp and white and circular. I was standing outside the loading bay of grocery store and there was no one else around and I was listening to that Heartless song by Christine and the Queens. 

I think I like the Worm Moon because back in Ontario it’s usually about now that spring starts to feel like spring, by which I mean, it’s warm enough at night to feel liquid in the air and not just ice, and there’s some plants with green edges in the dirt and water flowing in the gutters even at 2 a.m. and the general sense that things are moving again or if not moving just breathing again, and that night doesn’t freeze everything solid anymore. 

In Victoria by now the days are long and the flowers are out and the daffodils are almost over so the punch is less but the principle is the same. 

Rituals like this sustain me, little rituals of my life that remind me that I have a life that has a story, a throughline. As an ex-Wiccan I feel a little bad I didn’t cleave more strongly to Eostara or Brigid which serve the same purpose but it’s the Worm Moon. I remember in Montreal escaping a bedbug-ridden slum and looking up past the big low traffic lights into the black branches and seeing her glow, while smelling the sour breath residue on my coat collar. In bed at the cottage watching her drift past the scrim of maple twigs while squinting and holding up my hands and playing spears of light through my fingers. Yesterday, trying to remember to stand up straight and wandering deeper into a knot of increasingly nice houses slanting increasingly higher up one of Victoria’s many hidden Garry Oak knolls while the cherry blossoms shed their petals like confetti down the cracked asphalt.

I watched the translucent Worm Moon sink this morning over coffee while listening to Yeiji and lusting after ruffled blouses and leather weekender bags and trying not to think about how my grandmother is feeling faint all the time now and I have so much to do but I’m excited about it right this second and I will probably never feel completely clean.