Under a Blanket of Stars

We sat on the back deck last night, turned all the lights off in the back part of the house, closed the blinds that cover the sliding glass door, bundled up under a blanket and lay back on our reclining chairs to watch the stars. There are no streetlights in the neighborhood where we have rented a house, and obviously the omission was part of the building plan. Only the occasional car drove driving one of the roads nearby, its headlights dimming the stars a tad. I didn’t go camping as a kid, but I do remember seeing a lot of stars in the sky even at home, even more when visiting friends who lived out in the country. What is lacking in those memories is the awe that we felt last night.

The sky looked–cluttered; it didn’t look clear, it looked freckled. And there was just enough cloud cover to add a dimension of wispy opacity in a non-pattern, as if to add texture or softness to a blanket. The stars were so close that it was like looking up at a blanket that had been thrown over the earth as a protective barrier. I like the idea of a protective barrier keeping us safe even in the daytime. The stars are out there even in the daytime, we just can’t see them, so the blanket is there all the time keeping us safe. Safe from the unknown. Maybe safe from ourselves

I had forgotten that stars twinkle. Oh sure, intellectually I know that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is titled such because of the natural phenomenon. I just don’t actually think about it, or didn’t until last night. They did more than twinkle, they shimmered; they invited my eyes in for a closer look and then seemed to move, sometimes in a line, sometimes farther away, sometimes closer. Startled I would bring my focus back down to earth and blink only to see that the stars had returned to their original positions. They were teasing me, playing games from millions (or billions) of miles away, dancing around in the sky overhead, obviously delighted to be free up there in the night sky. Free to be seen, free to twinkle, free to shimmer, free to be part of a lovely, soft blanket we could wrap ourselves in just before we fell asleep.