Sun in Cancer

Cancer is the faintest figure in the zodiac, and at its centre is a soft patch of light the Greeks called the Manger, now the Beehive cluster: a thousand stars you can find without a telescope, far enough from the streetlights. The zodiac was drawn in the north, where the Sun enters Cancer on the longest day and the light begins, slowly, to turn. The sign keeps that picture wherever it is read: the most light, and the long turn toward home already under way.

This is the Moon’s own sign, and a Sun staying here leads the way the Moon does: with care, and by the side door. You reach hard things through the question asked over the dishes, the problem solved before anyone has named it.

Spare keys

You keep spare keys for three households and you know which neighbour is away. At work you learn the new starter’s name on the first morning, notice the colleague going quiet, and turn a team into something close to a family, whether or not anyone asked you to. People you have never met are looked after by what you do: the schedule you fixed, the form you rewrote so it made sense to someone’s grandmother.

Keeper of the family

Your family, by blood and by choice, has a keeper, and it is you: the photographs, the recipes, the story of how your grandparents met. You would rather have four people who would drive over at three in the morning than forty who would come to a barbecue, and you could name all four. Your memory is long and specific: the date, the dress, the thing somebody said at the funeral that nobody else heard.

Inside the shell

Care tightens into control, and protection hardens into a wall. You go into the shell at the moment you most need to speak, and a mood can sit over a house for a whole weekend. You look after everyone except yourself, and then feel, quietly, that nobody looks after you.

The crab carries its home on its back and is never without it. Neither are you: wherever you land, within a week you have made it a place people want to come back to.