Chapter 10 — Remembering the Cycle

Being at Sosta’s made Molly feel whole in a way that she wasn’t used to anymore and yet she recognised all of those feelings immediately. People gave themselves the permission to just be and to arrive in their own time. They could stay for longer than they said they would and life just went on around them. Food would just appear on tables and be eaten and then replaced by something else without anyone making a point of it. Conversations had no beginning and no end. There were children there but they weren’t the focus and no one organised themselves around them. They weren’t over-managed but someone was always near enough to care for them. Adults talked and moved and stepped aside as needed as those tiny legs ran between them.

Molly slept on a mattress on the floor because that was where there was room and woke up to voices already moving through the house. She could hear cups clinking and someone laughing. No one came in to tell her what time it was or what she should be doing first. She followed Sosta into the kitchen, where Sosta’s aunt was cooking and talking at the same time and handed her a plate without making much of it.

Molly ate standing up and listened. Arguments flared briefly and then quieted down. Laughter did the same thing. People moved in and out of rooms with dirt on their shoes or wet hair from the water and no one commented on it. Some people outside sat under a tree while older relatives talked nearby about people who had died and people who had been born and people who had left and come back again.

At one point, Sosta’s uncle sat down near them and tipped his head back toward the sky.

“You know,” he said as he squinted up through the branches, “that’s the same moon.”

“The same as what?” Sosta’s cousin said.

“The same one,” he said. “Same one we’ve always had. Same one Nan used to go on about when she couldn’t sleep.”

Molly laughed a little.

“The moon?” she asked.

“That’s exactly it,” he said. “Looks the same. Always does. No matter how many cycles it goes through and how different it looks at different times of the month, it’s the same one.”

That night, the music started back up and people danced badly and without embarrassment. Molly made the seemingly stupid mistake of trying to sit back down and an older woman grabbed her hand.

“Don’t think too much. Just move,” she said.

Molly did. She might not have danced very well and wasn’t very careful with her footing, but she danced anyway. There was no one to correct her or watch her moves.

That was all they did all weekend long. They got up, they ate, they talked about everything and nothing, they danced and they slept.

Somehow, that felt like the most productive thing she’d done in years.