the dark sacred night

Tonight, I can see the moon from my window in this office. It's not full, but is reasonably close to being. I'm not sure if it is waxing or waning. I forget about the moon sometimes, for weeks at a time, and then I see it and the stars again and it all takes my breath away. The night sky has always filled me with a cool, clean feeling, like lying down in the middle of a frozen lake and closing your eyes and breathing in the wind that skims across the ice. When the sky is really clear, I feel like I'm inhaling a kind of exquisite celestial vapour and there is nothing so pure in the world. All that black and silver. But I guess that is just the distance. Up close, the stars are a mess, and the moon is a dusty, lonely place. You look back at Earth, all blue and friendly, and think, What the hell am I doing out here? Why would I ever leave that behind?

Back when I lived in the Caribbean, one of the most phenomenal meteor showers in decades took place (the 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower). It was absolutely incredible, like someone was setting off fireworks, like something engineered. I watched it from the house I was living in, up on a hill with Stumpy and Conrad and the unlikely trio of my housemates (a sailboat captain, a lottery winner, a radio DJ with an enormous pickup truck). But another friend of mine had the right idea: She watched the meteor shower while wading in the sea, which is full of tiny bio luminescent creatures along the beaches of the islands. They light up as you move through the water. So imagine that, watching the pitch black sky rain with light while all around you in the dark ocean, tiny little life forms make your every move glow green. How wonderful! What a world!

I watched a fantastic movie last night called "Splice". (Writing "glow green" up there in that second paragraph made me think of it.) I'm not usually a huge fan of sci-fi entertainment, as it doesn't usually feature period costumes, rickshaws, the Nile, gramophones, journeys overland by elephant, or chemin-de-fer (except, apparently, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, season 4, "Our Man Bashir"); they are also often very LOUD, which I'm coming to realize I do not love in movies. However, I thought Splice was a great success. Fascinating, weird, and kind of heart-wrenching; of course, it was pretty darned silly, too. I give it a thumb up. Stumpy does too. Two thumbs up from Stumpy and Stumpy.

... it smells like pregnancy

Back in December, when I was about seven point five months pregnant, I developed really intense pica cravings having to do with smell. Pica, according to americanpregnancy.org, is "the practice of craving substances of little or no nutritional value during pregnancy". That it is described as a "practice" is a little odd, because it is definitely not something that one sets out to do, like meditating or providing legal advice for a fee. It's more like a bizarre compulsive habit that creeps up on your mind and then becomes a near-constant distraction. Women with pica desire a variety of things, many inedible, like bricks, cigarette butts, paint chips, soap. I've read more than a few internet testimonials in which pregnant women waxed rhapsodic about ice or expounded upon the strange hold magic markers had on them. (I myself deeply understand the allure of the Sharpie.) In my case, I didn't crave bowls full of freezer frost or the taste of the sidewalk; the pica I practiced was all about the nose. Suddenly, near the end of my second pregnancy (nothing like this had ever happened in the first), I just couldn't get enough of certain very chemical, very fume-y smells:

The garage - oily car engine, huge cans of paint, cardboard boxes: heaven.
Wood furniture shops - varnish: delicious.
Books - especially phone books.
Firelighters - these I would think about, but would only very rarely allow myself a sniff.
Wet paint - I was a moth to the flame of my friends' newly-painted burglar bars.

Sunlight brand lemon dishwashing powder - amazing.
Newspapers - especially the glossy holiday advertising inserts.

I found myself wondering if we had any Whiteout in our filing cabinet, but I didn't actually search for any. It didn't seem prudent to add any more neuron-vanquishing temptations into my life. I also started reminiscing about this games/stationary closet that our neighbors had in their house when I was a kid. It smelled so good. I could stand in there in the dim light, among the jigsaw puzzles and the construction paper and the Trivial Pursuits (Junior and Genus editions), and never see any reason to leave. It was a very blissful place for me.

This last pregnancy brought about other olfactory oddities as well: Something about the taste of chicken began to remind me of the smell of fish and I had to stop eating it (chicken). Water smelled really intense to me, and then plastic things, like our telephone, began to smell like water. All of this was so powerful at the time that I couldn't imagine it all going away once the baby was born. I thought something in my brain had been altered permanently. But, of course, I was wrong. I sniffed the dishwashing detergent the other day out of plain curiosity and nearly choked to death on a tiny cloud of toxic lemon dust. It was horrendous.