Lunar Strangeness

January was a blue moon month –two full moons; and that February is, consequently, a no-moon month – how often does that happen, and what is it called? And that means that March will also have two full moons. Checking The Old Farmer’s Almanac ahead for the rest of the year, there are no more blue moons scheduled, and certainly no more missing-moon months. Checking the Space.com website – which is a kind of nifty website, it turns out – they call January’s second full moon the “Super Blue Blood Moon” and inform us that there will also be a total lunar eclipse of it. 

There are a couple of other interesting juxtapositions in the first quarter of this year: Valentine’s Day is also Ash Wednesday, which means some folks who get chocolates from their sweetie on Valentine’s Day won’t be able to eat any because they gave up chocolate for Lent; and my favorite – Easter Sunday is also April Fool’s Day! There’s cosmic commentary for you!

The critters get kind of whacky around full moons, and last month was no exception. The Barkie Boy nightly delivered a squeaky toy that he dropped at my feet so I could toss it down the hall, over and over and over, making it squeak dementedly as he raced back with it in his mouth. Not bad for a mostly-deaf 16-year-old hound. Catman was in full, overloaded coon cat mode: shredding whatever caught his attention with his extra-large paws, in an elegant long stretch taking up more than half the critters’ side of my bed and daring the Barkie Boy to do anything about it, leaving the dog to curl up in a tight, nervous ball at the foot of the bed; and demanding attention and hissing when he doesn’t get enough. 

Winter Lace; Deb Marshall photo

Beastreau Biscuit, besides doing a rocket-speed race around the house every so often for no apparent reason, has renewed her dedicated mousing night-time activities – that kind of stimulation I can happily support, unless she brings another live one up from the cellar to join the fall kitchen mouse in the pantry, where it seems to have moved and has wreaked havoc with a bag of peanut butter cups I forgot was stashed there.  

I think I’m happier with the mousie hiding somewhere in the pantry than I was when it was doing a nightly dance across the top of my kitchen counters. The ripening tomatoes have been safe, and I’m not constantly cleaning up mousie poop, but I haven’t managed to discover where pantry mouse is nesting, yet.  Many bags of strong-smelling mint have been scattered about the pantry shelves, hoping to discourage Mousie, and I just hope that doesn’t drive her back into the kitchen. Some day soon (after I’ve finished the tax prep, after I’ve gotten a few other important items scratched off the to-do list) I’m going to have to haul everything out of the pantry and see if I can find Mousie’s lair.

Full moons affect people, too. I can guarantee that more than half my patients will find themselves more sensitive to needle insertion for the week surrounding a full moon, and when I was teaching t’ai chi, there would be a week when no one could remember moves they’d done for a decade, they’d lose their balance, and it was hard to keep the class’s attention. Students who are psychiatrists or psych nurses have told me they dread full moon nights – their patients will have exacerbated symptoms, and whoever’s on call is sure to be called, over and over. Policemen also tell us that full moons create interesting work conditions.

People are animals, deep under the skin, no matter how sophisticated we think we are. The full moon pulls on the sea that is us, as surely as it changes the size of tides in the ocean. We may not notice that we’ve been affected, but we should just assume we are. 

Which makes me extra nervous about our current state of affairs. We have a man-child sitting in the President’s seat, who has proven over and over that he has little sense about what’s appropriate and no filters; and he’s surrounded by advisors – and maybe a few keepers who must be frustrated, irritated, and who are only partially successful – who are as tone-deaf or as self-centered and sociopathic as the man-child himself. Congress, which is filled with more patron-sensitive lackeys than patriots, has proven itself incapable of doing anything that it bipartisanly agrees on, much less the things it can’t agree on – it’s not going to save us if the man-child throws a dangerous tantrum. Alas.

I’m not sure what ancient peoples did to calm the waters during crazy times, but maybe we should find out and try it. Nothing else seems to be working.

And just in case keep your fingers crossed for the next few months, don’t walk under any ladders, don’t cross any black cat’s path, and don’t read Twitter rants.  A little salt tossed over one’s shoulder wouldn’t hurt, especially if it happened to disable a certain someone's technology toys.