October 20, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Where the Moon Makes a Path”

On one Saturday in particular, a heavy fog of manure moves through the morning — stretches itself out over the dew drenched grass and catches in the thick fur of far reaching ferns. I sit, cross-legged, on her wooden deck and look out at the lawn. I bury myself in blades of grass and breathe in deep. It smells like the summer I grew up, like the farm upstate and the women who woke at dawn to summon the start of the day. They turned us loose in fields like this one, let us go wild when the sun went down, and I want to run, like I did then, so fast that I could not feel my feet, could not fathom the way I was flying, and it gets dark in the same sort of way here, a slow burning flame that flickers for a long time before blowing itself out into night, where the moon makes a path and pulls you towards it.