Reading · Sudden Journeys

Tonight the blue moon is rising here in the English countryside, and I am thinking about a night in Florence 22 years ago. A night sky that held a Blue Moon.

Blue Moon rising outside my window | Northamptonshire UK } May 31st 2026

It was July 2004 and my first summer living in Italy. It was hot in a new way. Not Tennessee hot or Savannah hot. I was well acquainted with those hot summers. Florence hot was thick and close, it hangs in the city.. the Arno valley is stone bowl holding the air, the kind of heat that doesn’t break at dark but only softens slightly. And I was on the back of a motorino, and the man driving smelled of sweat and aftershave, and all of it was like something out of a movie scene.

We were going into the hills north of Florence for a night of music and dancing. That summer I discovered a new side of the city: there were these pop-up spaces scattered through the dark, outdoor places where people gathered to dance until it got light again. I had never done anything like it in my 24 years of living and I don’t think I’ve danced that much since. I didn’t have the word for what I was doing. I just knew the air was moving past me and the sky over the city behind us was this particular deep blue that even now I can see in my minds eye.. the one that comes after dusk and before true dark. And I remember thinking, with my arms around him, the Blue Moon rising and the lights of Florence dropping away below: this is my life. This is happening to me. This is the thing I longed for. I am now living my dreams.

Because four years earlier, it hadn’t been. Four years earlier I had only dreamed living in Florence. I had wanted, the way you want at twenty-something, to live in a foreign country, to be swept into some beautiful romance, to be the kind of person things happened to you only see in movies or read about in books. And I had met him already, by then. On a bridge. Not the Ponte Vecchio but the next one over, the Ponte Santa Trinita, the three white arches the Germans blew apart in 1944 and the Florentines hauled up out of the river stone by stone and set back exactly as they had been. A bridge that was destroyed and remade. I didn’t know that history then. I only knew I was standing near the middle of it when something passed between us, a current of attraction between two strangers that would turn into a fever dream of a romance during a study abroad week in Florence. That’s all it was. A chance encounter on a bridge that had already proven it could come back from the dead. And then four years later, not planning it, not engineering it, we came together anyway. The thing I had wished for arrived, and I was inside it before I understood it had come.

There is a kind of song that lives in a person. For me this memory is tied up with the Edie Brickell lyrics, once in a blue moon there comes somebody like you. Once in a blue moon. Not never.. not always. Just sometimes, and rarely, and you cannot summon it on a schedule.

The phrase is literal, it turns out, before it is ever a feeling. The moon takes about twenty-nine and a half days to come around, which means most months hold a single full moon and nothing more. A blue moon is only what we call the second one, the rare extra, when the timing happens to fold two full moons into the same handful of weeks. It does not arrive on request. You wait years between them. And long before anyone did the arithmetic, people called it the strange moon, and tied it to turning points and wandering luck and the making of wishes, and believed that what begins beneath a blue moon is rarely forgotten.

I believe that last part without needing the folklore. I have a motorino and a hillside above Florence to prove it.

I am at a hard stage now. I want to be honest about that. I have lived what Eugene Peterson called a long obedience in the same direction, and a long obedience is exactly that, long, and obedient, and not always lit from the inside. I have seen and experienced a great many things I once dreamed would come true, which is its own strange grief, because a dream that comes true stops being a dream. And I am over the hill now, literally, at 46 years old sitting on the far slope of so many things, watching this moon come up over a country that is mine now in a way Florence never quite was.

And what I feel, watching it, is the ache. The ache for that carefree girl on the back of motorino with a man I could hardly communicate with in words, who did not yet know how rare the night was. The ache for the newness, the not-knowing, the hope that hadn’t yet been spent on anything. And underneath the ache, the question I am almost afraid to write down: will I ever be worth that again. Are there still nights like that left for me? Are there memories I haven’t made yet, or have I already made the ones that get remembered. I don’t say this to be dramatic rather it’s the kind of question that haunt me as I lay in bed past midnight remembering when…

But here is the other thing the blue moon is for, and it is not a tidy resolution, it is closer to a warning. The night above Florence did not wait for me. It did not hold itself in reserve until I was ready or worthy or sure. It came, and I had to be the kind of person who got on the back of the motorino with a man I’d met in passing. I had to say yes to the hills and the dark and the dancing. But the yes that mattered came long before that night, and it was bigger than a boy on a bridge. The chance encounter on the Santa Trinita would have stayed exactly that, a current between strangers for a brief moment in time, if I had not first said yes to Italy itself. To leaving. To moving my whole life across an ocean toward a place I had only dreamed. That is the yes the night was built on. Everything I have now, the whole shape of the life I am sitting inside tonight, traces back to that single decision to go. Four years is a long time for a current to hold, and it only held because I had already moved myself into its path.

Life does not wait for us. The things we ache for come around sometimes only once, and the choosing is not in the wishing. The wishing is easy. The wishing is what I did at twenty-something, and the wishing alone never put me on that bike. What put me there was a step taken toward the thing instead of away from it. Not manifested. I didn’t dream this life into existence. I actualized it through deliberate choices and sometimes spontaneity.. jump and the net will appear. There is a difference, and the difference is your own two feet. You cannot live your way into a thing you keep talking yourself out of. Sometimes too many of us get good at that, why there is always a better time, especially in a hard stretch, at the talking ourselves out of it. The case for staying on the shore of our lives.

But that’s never been me.

So tonight I am holding both. The memory of what I had, the girl in the blue dusk who is gone now and not coming back. And the knowledge, surer now than it has ever been, that I am still her underneath. And the belief that the moon will rise like this again, and that when it does I will not be at the window aching. I will get on the back of whatever it is. I will go up into the hills and keep crossing oceans toward a country I had only dreamed.

Once in a blue moon, there comes a night like that.. a life like this.

Once in A Blue Moon

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