When Bluejay Stole the Moon

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first moon walk, last July, I wrote a story taking off from what little I remembered of watching that historic moment on TV in Santa Fe.  (Coconut cake!)  And in discussions with friends about where they were, what they remember, I learned that we all seem to remember most vividly the little things that happened to us personally that day, what we were focused on in our personal orbs, and that the moon (as usual, despite the unusual circumstances) cast only a very little light on what was going on with individual relationships and dreams and fears.

The story, which turned into something I named "When Bluejay Stole the Moon," has just been published by The Woven Tale Press, in its Spring 2020 issue.  (Also available in print.)

Much of the fun of writing it was sending myself back to Santa Fe the way it was in summer 1969, noting things in our general culture like Dr. Pepper, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Abbey Road, and making alum crystals, but especially reveling in what was special about that particular place, then.  It was also fun to live those days as someone else than who I was, and to invent a family of friends I would have loved to spend time with, with horses and a house I would have been thrilled to visit.

"Jodi felt closer to the possibility of religion somehow at the Freys' house, among their carved kachinas, painted Guatemalan saints, and little Burmese Buddha keeping watch without judgment from a recessed wall niche.  Their graceful adobe house was in the older part of town, where there were artists' studios and the acequia and corrals, as well as restaurants like El Farol and The Three Cities of Spain—not like the soulless modern neighborhood where Jodi and her parents lived, little boxy yards enclosed by ugly cinderblock walls and planted with twiggy trees, no bosky shade, lofty cathedrals of rustling leaves and dappled light."

 "They rode bareback across their rambling property and along the trail through the neighbors', all the way to the far stand of cottonwoods and back.  Anya draped herself over Conejo's broad withers, the variegated browns of his namesake rabbit, the Eastern cottontail, her hands wrapped in his silky mane. Jodi rode awkwardly upright, bouncing more than she wanted, unable to grip Sibu's warm chestnut flanks tightly enough with her unpracticed thighs and knees, but glorying, especially when they cantered down the long, sandy arroyo bed, imagining herself Theseus's bride, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, proud warrior bright with scorn."

image:  Susan Seddon Boulet