Tag Archives: witchcraft

I got married on September 27, 2008, at 5:30 p.m.; seven years and four hours later my husband and I were standing in a deserted picnic area by the highway outside of Great Barrington, MA, watching a red mist take over the moon.  If any mystic horror was going to happen to us in our lives, it would have happened then, right? So we stood there, enduring the eldritch hooting of remote owls or wolves and less-remote humans,  plus the roar and blaze of cars on the highway, plus a strange throbbing that we thought was coming from an invisible body of water a few feet away, and we didn’t quite know where the drop was, and we also couldn’t quite see our car where we’d parked it in the darkness; forgetting, a little bit, that we were parents and that our two-year-old daughter was sleeping at my brother’s house in Springfield fifty miles away, but not forgetting that we were partners, and that we had been together forever, and now we were two bodies on this strange margin of nature and culture that was entirely not wild but also not entirely safe; and we waited, and ducked our heads when car headlights passed so they wouldn’t blind us to the stars that we never got to see in Brooklyn, and we watched.

I knew people were excited about this eclipse, but when we got back to our hotel feeling like we’d actually seen something, or risked something as a couple, on this weird magic day inside our marriage (I know, we’re citified wusses, we were in no danger, but you guys! Didn’t you know that you’re always in danger? Doesn’t a blood moon sort of tell you that, too?), and I had cell service again, it seemed like all my friends were also really seeing and risking and feeling something in the light of the blood moon, too. So I thought we should probably register that this had happened, document our collective experience of eclipse or of moon worship, collate the evidence that We Were All There. Moon stuff is feminist stuff by definition, right? I asked the Weird Sister staff, plus some of my friends and family, to tell us how it went for them. I ended up with two posts’ worth of moony stories; here’s the first installment! Continue reading →