The rising harvest moon found me purusing the low country streets of Sullivan's Island, SC on a cruiser bike with Mom. Riding loops around the empty carpool circle of the abandoned elementary school, palm trees rustling in the warm salt breeze, the moon quietly rose the warmest golden globe above the ocean and power lines. It peered around the brick corner of the spooky, vacant school and infused me with the heavy essence of Indian summer on the SC coast, a place that is haunted with old stories. That is the same moon that shone upon Edgar Allen Poe as his pen marked the page with weirdness here- it peered through the Gold Bug tree just across the island on the marsh side. It is the same moon that shone upon the tens of thousands of West Africans who arrived on the shores in captivity to be sold as slaves to plantation owners. It saw the construction of Fort Moultry into the dunes near to where the empty elementary school stands now, and it saw the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. It is the same moon, turning its devoted circles around our situation, that has born silent witness to all the years here, the patterns of suffering and change, pulling the tides in and back out and watching the drama below play itself out.
I caught my first glimpse of that amber harvest moon through the rustling leaves of a palm tree growing at the corner of that empty school. The sight of it and the perfection of the soft wind blowing off the ocean stopped me dead in my cruiser bicycle tracks for some moments. The spookiness of the school and the island in general overwhelmed me. This was the moment that, had I not broken my camera last month, I would have pulled it out and snapped some still lifes to post here for you people to see what I saw. But alas, as Poe did in his months of misplaced military service here on this island, I committed myself to the practice of old fashioned observation and dedication to the transferrence of information and experience through the art of the written word.
As I have mentioned twice already the breeze of the evening was warm and salty and perfect. I would call it divine, but the experience was one of such an earthly and impermanent nature I will instead call it delightful. The lights of the westerly sun setting and the harvest moon rising boldly in the east caused everything to appear warm and nostalgic and beautiful, even the piles of yard debris lying on the sides of the road waiting for pick up- palmetto leaves, pecan branches, live oak twigs with dying spanish moss. The houses we rode by were lit in the kitchens and the residents went about their kitchen chores with relaxed low-country pace. The smells- fish and salt, laundry detergent, strange, lovely and musty myrtle and other unfamiliar seaside flowery smells, the faint odor of garbage sneaking out of trash cans. Crickets softly sang with the wind, and a few island birds cawed and crowed now and then. Mom and I didn't speak much, just pedalled and enjoyed the falling of the summer into the gentle arms of the Harvest Moon.
My love for the low country has been rekindled. Within the shadows of the live oaks, there seems to linger pieces of memories from years past and a still acceptance of the laws of nature, to which, no matter how hard we try to escape them, we are all still subject. Time will age us, and we will die. Fall will follow summer. Always.
