The Legend of Full Moon Rising

The legend of Full Moon Rising

                                   By Steve Harrison

      A man of white beard and brown hair crawled across a barren desert in desperation.  Dune after dune of endless sand lay before him for as far at the eye could see.  Making his last stand, the man committed himself to achieving the top of the next dune; beyond that he wasn’t sure he would be able to continue.  An hour later the man finally crested the top and peered over into the depression below. With the sun blazing in his eyes the man could hardly believe his good fortune; a small wooden structure revealed itself in the duned valley below. Not having eaten in the last four days he found himself clinging to this one bastion of hope.

      The man, with renewed purpose and waning energy set out to reach the structure which, as he got closer, looked more like a shack or a stand of some sort.  “Could it be a food stand?”, he thought to himself.  He allowed himself this thought briefly and then scolded himself for raising his hopes too high.  There appeared to be signage on the front with colors and numbers and pictures of which he could not make out the details.

      Still unable to walk, the man crawled closer and to his delight, discovered that yes it was indeed a food stand, a farmers market specializing in the sale of the humble onion. A large white wooden onion was attached high above the roofline in cartoon caricature. Not believing his own eyes he rubbed them and re-focused affirming his discovery. 

      The man, reared in a small outpost of fertile lands on the other side of the world, had grown up on the onions of his region and had developed a deep seeded love for all variety of Allium Cepa, the common bulb onion.

      “To what deity do I owe my good fortune?”, he thought to himself. “Not only have I discovered my only salvation of food for miles around in this forsaken desert, but they are serving my beloved onion, my best meal. Oh I can almost feel the crisp crunch on my teeth and the clear juice running down my chin. Oh happy day, oh happy day!”

    He crawled forth a little faster now but at his current pace it would still be a good thirty minutes to the shack; His mind turned to all things onion. 

     He remembered that his grandfather who had lived to the ripe old age of 100 years old had been quoted in his village ledger, as attributing his long life to two distinct things: Hard daily physical work and eating lots and lots of onions.

    The hard physical labor bit had always made sense to the man.  The regular exercise, he knew increased circulation and was good for his heart. But what was it about the onion? Was it the vitamins and minerals that manifested the fountain of youth in the onion or was it something more, something intangible or maybe mystical? He didn’t know for sure, he just knew that he loved to eat them and if it led to a longer life then it was a good thing. Deep down though, he suspected that even if strong scientific evidence pointed the other way towards the onion leading to cancer or other illness, he would probably eat them anyway; he simply loved them.

      The man had a wonderful childhood growing up in a small agricultural town where his mother and father tended to a bountiful garden yielding everything from rowed corn to melons of water, and of course his beloved onions.  There were no hard times of famine in the man’s early life such as he was experiencing now. He had grown with a wide variety of wondrous foods that were available in season, or put up into jars for winter subsistence.  It was this variety of foods that shaped the diversity of the man’s palate. There was no food the man did not enjoy as a young lad; sans one, the raisin.

      It is not clear the reasoning or logic behind the man’s aversion to the seemingly innocuous chewy brown fruit, but it could very well have been that heredity played a strong role because all three of the man’s children and his seven grandchildren, to this day, avoid the raisin like the black plague of old.

      Prolific since 1490 BC, the raisin at one time in early Roman times was so valuable that two jars of them was the equivalent of one slave in trade.  To the man though, two jars of them would be to insult the jars themselves.

     Fumbling through the pockets of his torn knickers the man found what he searched for, his last gold coin.  And with the coin tucked in his clutches he managed to pull himself upright, however difficult, to a standing position at the counter.   

     There was a lone person unpacking boxes from the back of the onion stand and was unaware entirely of the man’s presence. Unable to speak due to his emaciated state the man waited to be waited on with what patience he had left.  It was then that the man noticed the small cardboard sign propped up on the counter no more than an arm’s length away from him written in what looked like black pen:

  Sorry! N O   M O R E    O N I O N S.

     TODAYS SPECIAL:  RAISINS

   

    The afternoon sun beat down upon the desert without prejudice or preference. A light gust of wind stirred and swirled sand around the bottom of the shack but it was no match for the heat of the sun. The faint creak of a rusty hinge on the shack shutter was followed by a soft, rhythmic knocking of the plywood each time the wind came up.  A small tumbleweed was hung up on the back corner of the shack.  Riding the next gust, it wiggled itself free somehow and continued on its journey.  It rolled by a lone scorpion that appeared to be watching and was seemingly unaffected by sun or wind.

     The Raisin stand attendant, some ten minutes later, made her way up to the front counter to wipe it clean.  There, not at all upright anymore, was the cardboard sign with a ball point pen jousted through the middle like the axel of some strange wheel.  Confused, she looked out to the desert beyond and with a stoic look of oblivion and genuine befuddlement witnessed a man crawling away with a white beard and brown hair. The man was slowly moving back up the sand dune hill adjacent to his own down-tracks; Not at all dead yet, and still of sound mind he made painstaking headway back into the heart of the desert from whence he came.  His knickers were pulled down just far enough to expose his entire backside.