One night, when we were staying in Woodacre an hour out of San Francisco, Claytie and Scofie and I stayed in for the day, went to Fairfax for coffee but didn’t stray farther from home than that. Playing with the chickens in the garden, petting the wheezy old dog. There was lots of fresh zucchini that the neighbor begged us to eat, and tomatoes ripe in the garden to pick, and pie and wine fresh-bought from the grocery store, and we made dinner out of that and it was lovely lovely. Claytie and I polished off two bottles of wine between us, and decided that a walk was the perfect thing after dinner, and rolled off into the dead-dark night. There are no streetlights in the rural part of Woodacre, but the moon was full and bright and we walked, oh, not more than two or three blocks before we rounded a corner and were confronted dead-on by that beautiful blinding moon. We weren’t talking at all, just walking with our shoulders touching, and we stopped at the same time in the middle of the road, just dumbfounded by the powerful aggressive beautiful moon. We were drunk and leaning on each other a little bit, swaying back and forth together, at first to our own rhythm and then to the rhythm of the crickets going like mad all around us, just a symphony of bugs dying to get laid and crying about it into the moon. They were almost deafening, echoing each other, the sound getting swallowed up in the moonlight and spit out again all chewed up, ragged and lilting.
We swayed until we were dancing a little bit, there in the street in the moonlight. We didn’t say one word and I was loving Claytie so much, loving us so much, for being moon-drunk and wine-drunk and bug-drunk. And then a car came and our reverie seemed a little embarrassing and we scampered to the side of the road and leaned against each other again, but the spell was broken and we started talking about the heavenly flower-smell and looked at the flowers and then turned around to go home.
But: no streetlight. And now the moon is at our backs, and we don’t know the neighborhood very well but we definitely didn’t come very far—but no flashlight, and the street signs are unreadable in the dark dark dark, and we wandered around staring at our moonshadow feeling foolish for far longer than we had walked to meet the moon in the first place. What if we didn’t find home? And no cell phones either, to make scofie drive around looking for us, no keys, not even sensible clothes since we had decided to dress up for dinner. Dress clothes, and blankets around our shoulders, and oh yes I forgot the mugs of wine we still held in our hands, ridiculous, tottering up the street with emptied mugs. All night…
Finally there was a street sign that was sort of close to the moonlight. We both tried to shimmy up the pole to get close enough to read it, but cold thick poles are hard to climb drunk. Claytie hoisted me up—the physical theatre training coming to practical use at last!—and I read the street sign: Oak Grove and Garden Street. Our corner. And we turned around and there was the house; we were standing in front of it.
As we walked in to warmth and more wine and video games, the haphazard pulse of the cricket song lurched in my breast, and trembled a little, and gave way to electricity. But they’re still out there, rubbing away. For another month at least, before they all get cold and give up. They’re singing now, nine hundred miles away from me.