Fixed points

Now that Spring is just ahead, I linger outside as the edges of day smudge from burnt scarlet to soft purple. I'm awaiting the nighttime sky. With a great, familiar intention, I look for the few childhood constellations I still know. More than once--I remember a dock New Hampshire, and an Hawaii hot tub-- I have laid back against my arms to bask in the vastness of the black universe.

As a young teenager, my private universe was often asunder. Parents fighting, boyfriends coming and going, brothers to help raise, living from my roots, lots of home chores, schoolwork and piano practice always beckoning. It was way too much for one girl.

But. Many summer nights, long after the family was sleep, I propped my chin on a pillow nested in an upstairs bedroom windowsill, and searched for the comfort of constellations. Majestic, confident Orion. The happy, cocky, Big and Little Dippers. The huddled pack of Seven Sisters. The stars, seemingly immovable, were my family, fixed points of reference in a turbulent time. Watching them, charting them, remembering them--them usually eased me to sleep

They still are. And now that I've traveled all around the earth, and searched for roots ancient and ancestral, the stars have new meanings. Imagine the first people on earth migrating out of Africa and looking up: they saw these very same powerful, bright dots that I see tonight. Imagine: in a few hours, my friends in the Philippines, or Rwanda, will see nearly the same star-studded sky.

Younger, blessed and cursed with the gift of imagination, I used to ask the stars how I would survive if my parents got divorced, if my boyfriend stopped liking me, or I couldn't ever find my lost library books.

I still wonder. Standing in the driveway, peering up through our front tree, I ask myself the big, impossible questions of midlife. What will growing old be like? What does it feel like to be without parents? Will I, or my husband, die first? Will I live to see grandchildren? What legacies will I leave behind?

The sky still answers. The stars will always be there, it says. Count on it. Many havee, before you.

This settles me, and sleep comes.