Stars

Over the past couple weeks my parents have welcomed a houseful of holiday refugees into their home, filling this place with laughter as games, food and family traditions form a patchwork of happiness across the house. Every bed and empty seat around the dining room table has been filled up and we have stayed up way too late playing outrageous games of “telephone pictionary” and “blind man’s bluff”.

On the evening of New Year’s Day, however, we were more subdued. Too much pie and too little sleep made us all a little more contentedly quiet, and a group of us found ourselves lying on our backs looking up at the stars on the cement slab in the backyard. Far from any city lights, the sky was like a Turkish lamp, night-colored brass letting out pinpoints of bright white light. It seemed like it had been a while since I had laid out and looked at the stars. In retrospect, it was a good way to usher in the New Year.

The sky was huge. I needed chameleon eyes to take it all in at once, from one tree fringed end to the other. We lay in the dark, disembodied voices floating around each other as we pointed out familiar constellations and made up our own, measuring light years with our fingertips. Like I always do, I felt like I needed more than just my eyes to soak up the fullness of the stars, as though tasting and hearing stars could somehow help me absorb its grandeur, were that even possible. For the next hour or so, our conversation wandered on unmarked paths through the stars, paying visits to both the laughable and the profound: Papa talked about his cousins in Roswell, New Mexico who swear they’ve seen UFOs. Ross pondered whether or not space is really expanding beyond itself. Abigail wondered out loud if we were seeing old light, the ghosts of long-dead stars. Then someone asked if we believed in ghosts at all which set off a string of stories about strange incidents in childhood houses. We laughed and shivered in the dark, and I thanked the artisan of human curiosity for being considerate enough to carve out a universe of mysteries for us to explore.

We saw a few dim meteors graze the sky as we talked and occasional satellites stalked metrically across the night. But just as our conversation was fading out and the couch inside was beginning to sound more comfortable than the cement at our backs, the night sky exploded with the most beautiful falling star I have even seen. Leaving sparks of white hot light in its wake, it burned brilliantly across the sky for eternal seconds. Without chameleon eyes, our heads followed it like sunflowers. It was almost impossible to believe that something so stunning was completely soundless, though we filled the vacuum with our collective gasp. And when it finally fizzled out over the horizon, without thought or words, we all erupted in spontaneous applause. It must have seemed silly, a dozen mosquito-nibbled people lying on the ground clapping at the sky. But sometimes nothing else will do.