Eclipse Season & the Memory Dragon

The night a wooden dragon showed up at my door, and what it took me nine years to understand about it.

Aug 05, 2026

It was the second time in six months I woke up to a bang-bang-banging in the middle of the night that shook my whole house.

My home being a Quonset hut—which if you’re unfamiliar is basically a greenhouse with more steel and less glass. From a practical standpoint, one could describe it as a stylish sardine can. It was mostly helpless against the elements—letting in rain, snow, and all sorts of bugs.

One need only sneeze to shake it. This pounding threatened to take it down.

Outside, the dark of night lit up by the brights of a car blasting techno. The knocking continued. It was my seamstress — drunk. I buried my head further under the covers.

After a few minutes, a couple more pounds and the sound of something heavy being dropped, the car drove off.

In the morning, as I opened my door to leave for the day, I discovered a large wooden dragon resting against my house.

The Fire Dragon

By our best estimates, this dragon is a few hundred years old. Before finding a home in the bar of our restaurant, it lived what we can only assume was a colorful life. Dragons like this were built to perch on the corners of buildings as guardians—in places far away from Detroit, Michigan.

My former business partner picked this one up from a rare antiques dealer in San Diego, along with a canoe we planned to hang from the ceiling. We never did.

I never thought much about the dragon before the disaster — and, honestly, I didn’t think about him much after. Until he showed up at my door with the second set of banging.

The first time was six months earlier. Our sous chef came to wake me in the far too early hours of the morning. The restaurant was on fire — it was all over the news.

The Portal Finds You

Seamstress was my term of endearment for a loose acquaintance who was, in fact, my seamstress — but also my favorite source of town gossip, my interior design consultant, and the woman who once showed up at my house with a yoni steamer after I complained about a regrettable night.

In the wake of our restaurant burning, the construction workers had thrown all of the furniture outside. The dragon, despite surviving an explosion that melted our stereo equipment, sustained very few injuries.

Someone from the apartment building next door picked up our guy and placed him in the lobby. My seamstress, at the time sleeping with a fellow who lived in this building, became obsessed with returning the dragon to its rightful owner — me.

No Going Back

It wasn’t until years later, having given my life to the study of astrology, that I realized this very real dragon had found me in the middle of eclipse season, as the metaphorical severed dragon of shadow and light was sprawled across the body of my birth chart.

During this time of my life, I didn’t have a map to tell me that I would be ok after leaving the business I had devoted years of blood, sweat and tears to build.

I didn’t have astrology to hint at the future as I stumbled blindly through one of the darkest nights of my soul.

A Future Pause

Depending on your calculations, the nodes have either entered or are about to enter the Leo/Aquarius axis of our charts, the same place they occupied from May 2017 to November 2018.

Eclipses have been described as portals, ushering us into new timelines.

For me, looking at the mouth of this portal nine years later, I see someone who is unrecognizable to me now.

That person standing in Detroit, mourning the loss of her business, could have never imagined the entirely new life I now inhabit in Los Angeles, filled with people and experiences more enriching than I could have ever dreamed.

So much of astrology is centered around prediction, of trying to pull at the threads of history to make a cohesive story.

We go back in time to pick up a narrative that we fear will haunt us — we look to the past to see the future.

But what if we all kicked off this eclipse season by acknowledging how far we’ve come?

Standing at the edge of another portal, I see that my own life is testament to the power of fate and dragons and that life can be so much wilder than we imagine.

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