The moon rose huge and red over Searsburg Mountain as we drove home from my mother’s. I stopped the car to marvel at the impossible color, a glowing apple suspended in the winter sky.

“Look, girls, the moon is red!”

But the girls were absorbed in Judy Moody, MD and didn’t care about lunar phenomenon. I turned off their audiobook and they exploded in protest.

“Mommy, turn it ON!” shrieked C.

“And keep driving!” ordered A.

“Just look out at the moon, quick,” I pleaded.  “It’s enormous.  They call it the Long Nights Moon, because it’s full in December.”

“I know,” said A.  “Now turn on Judy Moody. PLEASE.”

There’s some inherent sadness in Sunday night, especially when you are driving back to a dark, empty house where the thermostat is turned low and no dinner is waiting.  Winter weekends when my man is away, I can’t bear to be home alone for long.  I take the girls out for pizza or Chinese or drive through the dark to visit family and friends, seeking out light and companionship, hot food and conversation.

But then there’s Ma Ingalls on the Minnesota prairie, alone with three girls during a raging, three-day blizzard.  Ma had no car, no neighbors, no take-out, no cell phone— no way to call or text Pa, who’d walked to town for tobacco and gotten caught in the storm.  Bravely, she lit the oil lamp for him and placed it at the window.

For three days and nights, Ma never cried or complained, not when she had to trek through blinding snow and screaming winds to feed the stock and milk the cow.   Not when icy snow blew in beneath the doors and windows, swirling on the floor of the little house while her girls huddled shivering at the stove and still Pa did not come home.

Ma’s situation puts my rare solo time in perspective.  How privileged I am with my oil furnace and all-wheel-drive wagon and two phones.  How mobile we all are in this high-tech modern world—and how restless.

I can’t imagine staying put for three days in a 20 x 20 house alone with my children.  Though I would do it if I had to, if it was a matter of survival.  And I suspect I would rise to the occasion, might even experience the relief of absolute commitment, the absence of nagging anxieties about health insurance, caffeine addiction, and what I should be doing with my one life.

If you have to milk the cow in a blizzard to feed your children, you milk the cow.  There is a kind of pure presence that comes with crisis, an intensity of focus that elevates the spirit.  As Anton Chekhov put it, “Any idiot can face a crisis—It’s this day to day living that wears you out.”

That Sunday night driving home, I longed to share with my children the wordless magic of watching the moon.  Despite everything, there it was.

My heart trilled with the wonder of being a lonely human in the 21^st century— iPhone humming in my pocket, CD blasting on the car stereo, and the red moon rising like a portent just before the Winter Solstice.

Earlier that morning I’d visited my grandmother, Deedee, in the nursing home where she’s starting to die.  At 93, she sleeps most of the day.  When my mother woke her, her startled blue eyes searched our faces, then stared off unblinking into the middle distance.  I held her hand, stroked her silken white skin, kissed her papery-fine cheek.

The oxygen tank huffed in the background, rhythmic as a metronome. My mother sat with Deedee and rubbed her shoulders, told her she was beautiful.  Time kept churning on, the unstoppable cycle of generations.

It was impossible not to flash-forward two decades and imagine myself at my mom’s bedside, or double that time and imagine A sitting at mine.

When I bathed the girls that night, the moon had grown distant, a white disc poised above bare black trees.

“OW, Mommy!” A cried as she brushed her teeth, as usual directing anger at me when something hurt.  But the flinch of pain turned to delight when she discovered a wiggly tooth—her first.  At age six, she’d been waiting a year for this rite of passage.  The incisor looked tiny in her big-kid mouth, a pearly relic of babyhood.

“Honey, that’s wonderful!” I said, and A threw her skinny arms around my neck.

I felt a pang of loss, realizing this very same tooth—the lower left incisor– had been the first to cut through her 6-month-old gums.

One night she’d sat plump and naked in the tub, chomping madly on a frozen washcloth, growling like a baby tiger. Later I’d put my finger in her mouth and felt the sharp ridge of the new tooth, a nub arisen from the darkness of her jaw.

Maybe we love the moon because it cycles each month, while our changes are linear, never to repeat.

This season, at least, there are moments of pause. When I go to all-school sing with C, she burrows into my lap and we sing a round to welcome the Winter Solstice.

“Light is returning,” chant the cherubic preschoolers.“Even though this is the darkest hour… No one can hold back the dawn.”

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