I told her I was looking forward to it. I don’t know if I was being entirely honest.
What we have are the supermarket kind, pale and hard, the ones that have been somewhere cold for a long time.
The strawberry moon comes from North America, where Indigenous people watched June’s full moon and knew it was time to pick berries. That makes sense if you’re standing in a Wisconsin field in June.
Here it’s late autumn. The fields are wet. The berries are not ready.
We’ve taken a lot of our sky language from the north. The harvest moon arrives in the spring. The hunter’s moon rises while half the country is up watching the All Blacks play somewhere in Wales. The names belong to seasons we don’t have, in places we’ve never been.
The Māori way is different. The maramataka doesn’t name the full moon and move on. It names every night of the lunar month, each iwi in their own way, tying each one to tides, to fishing, to planting, to what needs to be done.
The moon wasn’t a label. It was just part of how things worked.
We could use some of our own names. Names that fit.
Sunday night’s moon could be called the ‘‘thermal underwear moon’’. Down in Dunedin, they might know it better as the ‘‘why is there ice inside the car moon’’.
My own choice is the ‘‘soup moon’’. That’s what late autumn full moons are, if you’re honest. The moon comes up cold and the house smells like pumpkin soup, or it should.
Of course, the moon doesn’t care what we call it. On Sunday, it will rise at sunset, red at first, its colour fading as it climbs. It’ll be cold.
People will look up once, maybe, on their way from the car to the door. Maybe twice.
But for me, names matter. They’re how we say, ‘‘this is who we are and where we are from’’. This sky belongs to us.
