I used to pick blueberries in Vermont on warm summer days and hide in blueberry patches with a boy named Zach who sang me Beatles songs until my cheeks burned red. I would have preferred to hide in the cabin because my mind outlined too many drawings in the shadows, coloring them in with detail. I wouldn’t call it art. The darkness was the perfect canvas for my untamed, sometimes frightening, imagination. So I didn’t necessarily like hiding in the blueberry patches on those dark buggy nights playing tag with Zach in Vermont. 

 

One of those nights I sat huddled in the bushes, fearing what hovered in the shadows, waiting for someone to find me, and I let my ears succumb to the seductive songs of the cicadas. Surrounded by their clicking buzzing voices I felt lifted, like I was floating in the fresh air of the night: one animal, one piece of earth, among the rest. The stars were alive, a fuzzy infinity of light, and the moon, nature’s flashlight (actually, flashlights must be human’s moons), saw me as I saw her. 

 

Then the moon exploded onto my face as Zach came running up to me with his flashlight.

         “Can I hide with you?” He whispered as he crouched down next to me. The air around us quivered with the sound of the cicada chorus and our tentative breathing. A glint in the clearing caught my eye and Cruella de Vil’s hair looked at me with beady eyes. I nudged Zach and he immediately shone his flashlight at the skunk, frightening it. As it turned and began to lift its tail, we stumbled out of the blueberry patch, scream-laughing and giggling. I had never seen a skunk before, and part of me wished that I had quietly observed it existing instead of involving Zach. The other players had heard our loud reactions to the skunk and they came out of hiding to see what the ruckus was about. Once we explained, my sisters held their noses and pretended that Zach and I had been sprayed by the skunk, and the other kids laughed and played along. 

 

         “PEE-YEW!” They chanted over and over. Such children. I rolled my eyes and fought the urge to respond defensively to their mockery. The game was over and it was late, so everyone parted ways for the night. Back at the cabin I told my parents excitedly about the skunk. My sisters clamored about me needing to take a shower to wash all the stink off. My mom said, “I love that smell,” and my dad snorted.

 

         “Yeah, me too,” he jokingly agreed, “but not when it’s from the animal.” 

 

Before I went to sleep I wanted to look out at the night one more time, while I still felt alive with it. Outside the screen door—a thin, grainy separation between the world and me— and materializing like the Cheshire Cat, the outline of a moose appeared: 

 

Towering, antlerless,   

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).¹

 

It was bigger, and more majestic, than I could have ever imagined. I saw the moose and the moose saw me. There was no time or space involved: we saw each other and coexisted and were one, and then, all of a sudden, we weren’t. She disappeared into the night. And how could anyone have believed me when I told them? Sometimes I wonder if my mind was just painting the darkness as it often does… but a part of me distinctly remembers that moment with an inexplicable certainty. 

 

In the morning, my sisters and I picked blueberries with Zach, and I told him about the moose. He looked like the son of the sun, his red hair glinting in the morning light. And he wanted to find the moose with me. We ate our blueberries in pancakes and muffins and straight out of our stained hands, and we swam in the lake in the afternoon. We splashed each other and swam out to the raft and pushed each other off of it, laughing. 

 

After dinner, Zach was lounging, as well as one can lounge, in the swing outside the lodge. The sunset was combed through his hair, and he looked up at me. My skin trembled where it met the air, glowing orange. He tossed me a flashlight and raised his eyebrows. The moose. I felt weird. I thought he wanted to kiss me. If we went out looking for the moose alone, we would be alone. Once we were alone, a tree could fall that only we two would ever hear. I wasn’t scared of Zach. I dreamed up scenarios of our first kiss every night that summer. I was scared of a new experience, of vulnerability, of doing something that scared me. He was hurt when I shook my head, and the last week of summer seemed to happen all in a moment.

 

We never looked for the moose, but I didn’t really want to anyway—it felt disrespectful and invasive. That was the last summer I ever saw Zach and picked blueberries and saw a moose. But the moose’s eyes still glint like stained glass in my mind; I don’t wonder if it is in haunting or protection. It just is. 

 

“Yes ...” that peculiar   

affirmative. “Yes ...”

A sharp, indrawn breath,   

half groan, half acceptance,   

that means “Life’s like that.   

We know it (also death).”²