far

Creative Nonfiction

The Super Moon

Penny Nolte
issue three

---

We are sitting in the dark, except for a few last coals glowing in the campfire. The lake, just a shadow out ahead, lapping occasionally to remind us it is there.

In the back field our neighbors’ dogs start barking out the screen door at a pack of coyotes.

“Bark,”

“Yip, Yip,”

“BARK,”

“Hoooowl,”

It is an eerie sound, and one I don’t remember hearing while growing up. Now, they come by nearly every night, roaming across lawns and fields between the shore and the old harbor road. My cousin, visiting from the city, has been telling us stories about coyotes on sidewalks downtown, in daylight, ever since the pandemic. With people watching out for them and ushering pets and small children indoors when they see one coming.

Light sparkling off the water alerts us to the “Super Moon,” rising out back. Not only Full, but Big, as close as it gets to the earth. Not only Full, and Big, but a partial eclipse tonight. We rise, too, dragging lawn chairs into the field to watch. I’ve brought binoculars and zoom in on a bright face, “the man in the moon,” smiling down on us.

When I was a child, the moon landing was a big event in my family. We all sat around the rented TV, watching flickering black and white images of spacemen encased in boxes, awkwardly playing golf and planting an American flag. I’m not sure if the actual broadcast was grainy, or just our reception through rabbit ears that picked up one American and one Canadian channel.

That night, suddenly, Dad stood and said, “Everybody outside!” and led us into the same field we are sitting in now. Then he mused, “Would you look at that, there are real people up there on the moon.”

The coyotes begin to howl again. Much closer.

“YIP, Yip Yip, HOOOOWL!”

It gives me goosebumps and we speculate how close they are. Not directly next door, maybe the second lot over? Pulling our chairs up on to the porch, my view of the moon may be crossed by tree limbs and utility lines, but I feel safer now within the circle of light. My husband, searching on his phone about coyotes, reads, “‘Don’t worry,’ it says here, ‘if you see them approaching do not run. Walk toward them.’”