reading by moonlight

It was book club last night.
When I arrive at my friend's house, two starkly black and white magpies are perched on a wire fence, staring at the pale face of a rising moon. It is a blurred face. The birds look like clerics mesmerised by a pagan goddess. I smile at the incongruity of this image.

The moon tonight reminds me of that ghostly galleon in the poem we recited in primary school. The moon tugs at the tides as it rides them. Our book club, our “gang of four", reminisces about how we rode the waves of feminism in the seventies and reclaimed the night, we reached for the stars in our careers, we experienced loneliness and dark nights of the soul when relationships waxed and waned. 

 Now we are all nanas [or about to be] and we encircle grandchildren in our arms and sing "twinkle twinkle little star" and "the cow jumped over the moon."

Tonight we are discussing Brenda Walker’s book, Reading by Moonlight, a powerful narrative of her breast cancer journey and the books which sustain her. It is a book about loss and grief and fear and death and hope, and how we endure all of this because "the mind turns everything into a story." It is particularly relevant to us. Three of us have had breast cancer within the last five years. We too are readers. Some of us write.

 I like the way Walker compares reading with travelling. She writes that some of us "read as we hope to travel, flying away, losing our bearings just enough to be shown some strangeness, some wonder. Knowing we might not be comfortable for the whole journey but that we'll have something to talk about when we touch down."

Once when my grandson, Cameron, was three we were driving home in the dark after a day at the beach. He cried out with excitement. "Look grandad, the moon is following us." We looked. It was following us.
 It followed us all the way home.