Stars
It is an intoxicating early autumn evening. Unseasonably warm. The air is ripe with the scent of apples from our backyard. I had been raking up the falls and their scent deliciously clung to the night. Looking up at the sky, up past the roofline and the tree line and beyond to the stars. I realize I haven’t experienced the night sky in an innocent way in over a year, since last Labor Day.
My partner and I had gone with my mother to “Ring of Fire”, a celebration of bonfires around the Great Sacandaga Lake in upstate NY. It was one of those perfect late summer evenings made more perfect by the presence of family, some of whom, due to any myriad number of “life gets in the way” reasons, we hadn’t spent time with in what seemed a lifetime.
On the ride home my mother, gazing out the car window, absent-mindedly stated “I haven’t seen the stars since before your father died”. My heart broke apart inside my chest. I couldn’t imagine life without being outside at night, in the dark, in moonlight and starlight. It was at that moment I became aware of my mother growing old and the reach of her loss.
So it is I find myself outside this night, spying Orion in the sky like an old friend. Yet even he couldn’t unsheathe his mighty sword and slay the cancer that ate through my mother’s spine and tore through her body, only 5 months after that Labor Day car ride.
We are made from stardust and she has returned to stardust.
