the crowded sky

I have always said that I'd like to take each of my friends home to my folks' house, to see it and be there when it's really nice. May is good, and October. Where they are now, even the windy prairie winter would be interesting, it's so clear and cold. It's so peaceful - not dead quiet, but a comfortable sort of natural quiet. Just now, sitting outside: spring peepers from the pond my dad put in, the washer spinning down, wind in pecan trees and the thick brush between here and the next house, and the occasional car on the highway. But tonight is a night where I wish I could lead you all, one by one, out the back door of the sunroom to sit out and look up and up and up.

It's a moonless night, and windy, and the air is the very sweet sort of late spring air, kind of grassy - but not the wet smell of early spring dirt, more the smell of blooming trees and (probably pollen) a kind of unfolding, maybe? But on the west side of the house, where the barn lights don't blast out the stars, it is just unbelievable. You can hardly find the Big Dipper or Casseopaiea for the other thousands of stars. Venus is low on the western horizon and, I think, Mars is just coming up in the east. I know that the dusting of light between the perceptible stars is just the collected light of more, further stars. Staring up to it, my eyes lost focus and couldn't find the pattern of any constellations. What that I can remember, anyway, I could count on my fingers.

This is something I've loved as long as I can remember. We'd go out, in high school, and find a clear spot and sit and talk and look. I remember wrapping myself up in a quilt senior year and walking out into the alfalfa field and wanting to figure things out, and then turning for home because of the mosquitoes (no less clued in, but calmer). I would drive over to Pescadero in college and watch the stars over the ocean, and then turn around a drive back to campus. When I'm home - and the last few times, it's been cloudy, or I've been too busy, too tired - it is something that centers me. I'm always happy to see Orion in New York, to recognize anything in the night sky, but I know that there's more out there. Coming home, I find it.

Kolz asked me what there was to report from Pike County, and I reported: a tree frog on the window; Dad and I making most of dinner from a recipe that we unexpectedly found in the farm supply store; a baby horse here and another coming; a very feisty kitten who responded to me like the monster I must seem with spits & hisses and a tail like a bottlebrush; spinach from the garden; all of the Wabes ladies of my parents' generation save a few out for a mother-daughter potluck on Friday; sunshine; lots of bugs (a bad year for them).

I could also add: pretty drives on gravel roads with my dad today; mother's day gift intrigue; finding out that my 94-year-old great aunt played the violin and that she and my grandma used to get out of dishes by playing violin & piano after dinner. Finding out that my mom also used the same trick - somehow that deviousness missed me, but that's no surprise, really.

I was thinking tonight that when things get hard, when I'm out on my research year, I will think about tonight and remember the air, and maybe the sound of my mother sighing and yawning while she reads the papers, spring peepers, the wind. No industrial sounds, really. Like I remember one January walk with a high school boyfriend, and the beach at Pescadero, and the Tidal Basin in Washington. No place is without it's own edge of fear -- who knows what you'll trip over or step into, here -- but some have a familiar edge, at least.

I was home in Carbondale briefly on Wednesday, and it was so beautiful there, too. I slept in my brother's old room and could look down onto a hillside pasture, and the lightning bugs were unlike anything I'd ever seen. They blink in patterns, and so there appeared circles and lines and pentagons - odd geometry - but flashing like a techno video, or some sophisticated computerized something. It was stunning. They aren't out like that up here, but when the wind is lower, they will be. Nighttime this time of year is magical.