I sat with an older woman and her grandchild, in a convoluted past where I was dating someone and lived in the heart of their family for a brief space of time, years ago. We talked about the weather, the lush Richmond heat, the mosquitoes, lunch. I remember the smell of old varnish on wood, and natural light filtering in wherever it could, struggling to penetrate years of dust and sadness. The little girl, maybe 7 at the time, played on the floor surrounded with a myriad of pieces and parts of popular toys - tiny worlds for Polly Pocket, shoes and perfume bottles for Bratz dolls, Barbie stuff. She was silent, focused on her activity, putting things on and taking them off, her processes and curiosity hidden inside her slender frame.
'You know it's a Blue Moon tonight?' the grandmother asked me.
'A Blue Moon must be made of Blue cheese because you can't have a blue rock unless you paint it.' The little girl replied matter-of-factly without looking up, without pausing in her exploration of fitting pieces to parts and considering them. Her hands continued to move, but the fringe of straight blond hair kept her face hidden. I remember feeling a hit, like a singular drum beat in the center of my body, I was floored by how pure and logical her reasoning was within the scope of her awareness of the world and how it worked.
'She painted a rock blue in class today.' The grandmother smiled indulgently. The girl didn't respond.
A few weeks later the whole family took that little girl on a whirlwind vacation at Disney World, paid top dollar for the full Princess experience. A handful of aunts and great aunts and grandma pooled their resources to wander around in the Florida heat, their heavyset, aging crew shuttling her from Cinderella makeover to dinner with Belle from Beauty and the Beast. When they returned, their suitcases were packed to the brim with princess paraphernalia, they had taken a bunch of empty suitcases just for this reason.
Not long after that, the little girl informed her grandmother that she didn't want to hurt her feelings, but she was over the whole princess thing. Even though the grandmother couldn't help but see the humor in the situation, I could see that she mourned the loss of that experience. I'm sure part of her recognized it was more for her than the little girl the entire time.
That relationship fell apart, and the current has drawn me far from those people, but I think about her sometimes, that little girl. Her wide blue eyes are framed by sturdy glasses now, and I wonder how that shifts what adults see when they look at her, with her long, lean build and long blond hair.
A blue moon is an additional full moon that appears in a subdivision of a year: either the third of four full moons in a season, or a second full moon in a month of the common calendar. The phrase has nothing to do with the actual color of the moon. The suggestion has been made that the term "blue moon" for "intercalary month" arose by folk etymology, the "blue" replacing the no-longer-understood belewe, 'to betray'. The original meaning would then have been "betrayer moon", referring to a full moon that would "normally" (in years without an intercalary month) be the full moon of spring, while in an intercalary year, it was "traitorous" in the sense that people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent.
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