Stars

A girl looks up to the sky and to the heart of her grandmother

I have a brief and limited knowledge of the stars.  Maybe they’re pockets of fire in the cold, the floating campfires tucked into a vapor of oblivion that we can’t and won’t stroll alongside. Maybe stars are a new schema of thought, the mapping of a drive, a mechanism of comprehension that must be cultivated and developed and nurtured to foster conversation.

Stars must exceed a farmer’s knowledge because there are few stems of connection to what’s already known.  Down to earth means down to earth. If I could hold on to her calloused hand and walk with her tonight, my grandmother would see the sky as acres of good soil, ready for planting.  She would tell me the star beds are like the side yard flowers behind her kitchen sink with the stream of mineralized water.  She’d say that the really bright and strong grouping is like the asters that come back every year taller than the snap dragons without exception.  Then she’d show me the fragile twilight stars and tell me they were baby’s breath on the edges just like in the front by the well house. 

Astronomers could stretch and take a season off to plant a stand of herbs or tomato plants, but a farmer who knows of stars is likely no ordinary dairy farmer. If we connect the unknown to the known, my grandmother would have thought the image taken from NASA a close up of the center of a dahlia or a chrysanthemum. She would have imagined the seeds from a pack at Woolworths spilled into her hands or mine and sifted over the well tilled and imperfect waves of flower bed soil.  She would have expected a return, stands two feet high in early May, or late May if the frost wove the little shoots out. 

But these stars, light growing from nothing, stand in mysterious assembly.  They are headlights, parked ahead, unapologetic.  They are the nudges of okra stem or bean stalk fingering through the giant’s floor.

My grandmother would have been asleep through every star show.  Her eyes would have been heavy closed by that hour of night beside my snoring grandpa for what awaited her at five in the morning. She would have been asleep and so soundly asleep that the stars never knew her eyes as they know ours. The cattle’s rumbling lo, and the milk truck’s tire dust over dew could have kept her level headed all her days.  I trust she saw the dawning stars while her milking boots shuffled over the same slant of driveway to the barn.  It’s likely she scanned the milk yard and the cow pen for opossums or for empty shadows instead of looking for light in the sky.

But maybe one night, one night as she looked to the handle of the dipper, or saw something falling and trailing over her, she considered the stars to be God’s drawer of diamonds, reserved for the crown of singing children.  That’s what she would have said. But nobody would have heard her except the barn kitties. And yet there housed in the file, in the code, and in the hot bed of synergy is a rumble of what will be when dust meets dust, and the flowers of light and the flowers of night fill all deciduous space in the lonely echoes of every girl as she walks alone.

Reviews

[emmajoy]

' .. and in the hot bed of synergy is a rumble of what will be when dust meets dust, and the flowers of light and the flowers of night fill all deciduous space in the lonely echoes of every girl as she walks alone.'

Sam Dickens suggested i read your writing and I have - not once but twice and, am about to read it again. Thank you, Sam, for pointing the way to this wonderful post.

Nicole, you've written with a pen dipped in knowledge, understanding, sincerity and true as it can be - love for our planet, it's cradling space and - your grandmother's earth-taught wisdom.

There are people - more than we know, who understand Nature's machinations - a long word that's near unworthy to tell how what happens isn't manipulated or indefinitely altered because IT has a means magical that instinctively knows what it knows and - behaves accordingly. That dear woman knew she was right because it had worked for as long as she'd lived and before, The moon and stars guide growth, slowly, slowly draw goodness for the soil and then, invisibly nurtures with just mere help from bees, the elements and a mere touch of Human assistance. I suspect you know how.

This is such fine and heartfelt prose: ' But maybe one night, one night as she looked to the handle of the dipper, or saw something falling and trailing over her, she considered the stars to be God’s drawer of diamonds, reserved for the crown of singing children' - what truth, what perfection.

Many thanks for presenting this as a gift to what I hope will be a billion of readers, Nicole.

[Nicole Verrone]

Emmajoy, what gracious words. Unfamiliar with what I was signing up for, this was like coming in from the cold to a fire of oak and song. I hope to return the favor soon, and curl up with your writing. Thanks for such a welcome. Cheers.

[Samuel Dickens]

I am a bit amazed by this. It is novel, very creative and well-written. I'm often a poor reviewer, so I'm going to tell a friend about this.

[Nicole Verrone]

This review was such encouragement to keep sharing what resonates in my verse laden thought with others. Thank you, Samuel Dickens....