We spent Labor Day weekend with my parents. We is Nancy and I and Andrew (21) and Hope (17). My parents spend the summer in northwestern Wisconsin, so the weekend included twelve hours of driving each way from our home in Indiana.
A few days before our trip, my mother left a message on my phone. She told me the moon would be almost gone so the stars would be clear.
I told Hope that night. She said, “I was thinking about those stars.”
Saturday night, Hope and I went to the end of the driveway and laid down on the warm pavement. And waited. For our eyes to adjust.
More and more stars emerged, not because they were brighter but because our eyes calmed down. What appear as a handful of dots in our suburban backyard became drifts of light, piles of stars in some places, bare black pavement in others.
Hope noticed a star moving. As we followed it, we realized it was probably a satellite. We saw a couple more. We finally gave up.
I took Andrew out later. He bubbled. 21-year-old boys don’t bubble. He did.
Saturday night he took some pictures. He came back out on Sunday night and took more. Nancy came out Sunday night too, wondering what the attraction was. She grew up on a farm in southern Michigan. For her, stars showed up in drifts every night.
“But you deprived us of this by living in the city,” said Andrew, proving that he is, indeed, a 21-year-old boy.
Don’t give up, parents of young children. Don’t lament that the years of wonder end at about 7. Some nights, in the middle of the woods, stars pile up at the edges of the parking lot, and grown children are astonished.
by Jon Swanson
Photo graciously provided by itsswanny1, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved
2 responses so far ↓
inthefastlane // Sep 4, 2008 at 9:15 am
I still look in wonderment, when we are in the mountains, at the start. they really are amazing.
Chris // Sep 5, 2008 at 6:37 am
I saw the Milky Way for the first time when I was about 20–while out at “star party” in the Virginia countryside with my dad. I was awed. About 15 years later, my dad and I visited a small observatory in Washington state (he and I share a love of astronomy) and during the outside observation period, we got to watch the moon rise into a dark sky–a spectacular sight that my dad, then 54-years-old, had never seen. Even grandpas aren’t too old for stars.
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