Dotwork moon and stars on a shoulder blade

You will not believe what Mr Pargeter has done with the chapel roof. Last Tuesday he climbed up with a bucket of tar and a ladder borrowed from the coal yard, and by Thursday the whole village had come out to watch him sit astride the ridge tile with Dad's old opera glasses, shouting at the sky. He says the full moon was pulling the tide up the Tarn, and he wanted to see it do it. Nobody has had the heart to tell him the Tarn is three miles from the sea.

I went up to the schoolhouse afterwards, because Miss Oakes had asked me to fetch the chalk, and found the blackboard already covered in a drawing of the sky. Forty stars, each one pressed in with the blunt end of a pencil so they looked like frost on a window. Beside them she had written in her big careful hand, "Tonight the old moon goes thin and the new one starts," and drawn a crescent no wider than my thumbnail. The children were told it was a lesson on phases. I think it was a lesson on waiting.

The crescent is the part I keep thinking about. Mother used to say a moon that thin is only borrowing light from the full one, and gives a little more back each night until they are both the same. I told her that sounded like a poor arrangement. She laughed and said that was how it was with most things worth having.

Come home at Christmas if the trains run. Bring the blue cardigan you left on the hook, and I will show you the chapel roof. It is not finished. Mr Pargeter says he still has a crescent to put on it.

Your loving sister, Edith