09/16/2025 Tuesday 62-75F Cloudy
I remember that I haven’t seen the moon for quite a while. A few days in last month, every time I woke up during the night, I could see it hanging in the sky looking over me from the east corner of the window. If I couldn’t go back to sleep, I watched it. Slowly and steadily, it crossed the whole window from the east to the west until I couldn’t see it. The time was between 1:00am and 3:00am. Before its round face was gone, its silvery, pure light flooded the floor, and gave everything in the room a sheen with a soft silhouette.
I have always loved to watch the moon. When I was a kid, I slept often either on the roof of the house, or in the yard during summer days. The moon usually rose early. Before 9:00pm, it had already appeared over the trees. I looked down, the ground was as smooth as the sandy bottom of the sea, while the shadows of the tree branches on it were like seaweeds and coral. I stretched my arm to try to reach the moon, of course I couldn’t, and that arm now has become much stronger and tanned after so many years.
Another scene that popped into my mind about the moon in my childhood is that, when I was about eleven years old, I always loved poems and traditional literature. One evening after dinner, a friend of my family came to have his routine chat with my father, while I was hiding under a plantain near the corner of the eave, writing a poem. The shadows of the plantain’s big leaves given by the full moon covered me very well. Randomly one or two sentences from the chat in the living room came into my ears. I looked up at the moon, working very hard to search my brain for the proper words for my poem.
I indeed was a shy, quiet kid; then a shy quiet young woman; and now the first impression I give to people is still quiet, perhaps not that shy anymore.
And last night I dreamed about moon as well. In my dream I was with a relative in Hongkong, though I never had a relative there and right after the dream I couldn’t remember that relative’s name nor his face. The only thing I knew in my dream was that he was my relative, and that he just purchased his first home with his wife in that crowded, expensive city. Therefore, he invited my sister and me to visit his home. It was like a townhouse, or an apartment on the first floor because we were all sitting in the yard, taking a “moon-bath”. The moonlight was clear yet intense, I joked that the moon perhaps would make us all tanned.
In the dream, my relative and his wife were so proud of their home. They showed us every part of it, swaggering, and talking about their big plans about how to make it even nicer. I smiled, fully understood; I told myself that I was like them too when I just purchased my house.
Then the dream was gone, I woke up again at 1:38am. No moon.
But recently I saw groundhogs a lot. Almost every time when our car entered the backyard from outside, I could see a chunky groundhog rushing out of my vegetable bed toward the back fence. It had put on tons of fat, but when it ran, it really didn’t look clumsy at all. I think that’s the most mysterious part about it.
In fact, there aren’t many vegetables in my bed now. It’s September, has been dry and warm during the days, cool and dewy at night. My three tomato plants didn’t grow as vigorously as last year. They lay on the ground; piles of branches and fruit on top of each other. Usually, I pick the fruit every other day, but sometimes if I am too busy, I leave them on the plant for several days which provides the groundhog plenty of time for theft. I don’t mind about his stealing at all, only if he can conduct himself better. For example, every time when I picked the tomatoes, I could find dozens of them half or quarterly eaten, or with one or two little holes in them obviously poked by some guy’s paws. So those tomatoes had to be dumped. What a waste!
The bamboo poles for the tomatoes tilt toward all directions, failing to offer the plants a good support. I tried to fix them, but the soil became rocky 2-3 inches down, plus the fact that the weight of the plants made it harder to straighten them up. Anyway, I didn’t trellis them up right in the first place, which also tempted the groundhog to keep pulling down the vines so he could feast on the tender shoots and ripe fruit. And this part of soil perhaps has significantly lost its nutrition after planting tomatoes at the same spot for three years. So next year for sure I will relocate my tomatoes, build them a solid, aesthetic trellis; and I will learn more about how to prune tomato plants more professionally to maintain a nice size instead of letting them grow into jungles which makes it hard for me to pick the fruit as well.
Dramatically, as a comparison, my loofahs at the other side of the bed grow lavishly. They have formed a green leafy wall with everyday nearly a hundred of stunning, pretty yellow flowers on it. It is a big show place: Bees (they are crazy about loofah flowers), ants (they are all over the plants: the stems, the leaves, the blossoms, the fruit, and even the twines), butterflies, ladybugs, other unknown insects… It’s entertaining to watch them as they seem to collaborate very well just to get us more loofahs!
The loofahs are like playing hide-and-seek. Since the leaves are so dense, every day we have to spend some time find the grown fruits. Even though, it isn’t surprising if we happen to see an overgrown loofah. They grow rapidly; just overnight, they can grow from a teenager into a young man. We see so many baby loofahs (we could have much more if deer didn’t munch on the young shoots), and are planning to share them with our neighbors especially the one who generously donate part of their fence to our loofahs. While I am worrying about how to explain to our American neighbors about the cooking way of loofah, my husband simply suggests: “Treat them as zucchini.”
At that moment, I admire him so much!