Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #1 Entry

Nights With the Kids and Time with Nature (January 15, 2012)

Becca is a smart kid. My twelve-year-old daughter shares the experience that will be my first Nature Writing blog entry as we step outside on a cold January night. Our backyard is of average size but flat with a rough, uncultivated wooded hill behind and a fair view of the sky. We are natural talkers, so we quickly turn to discussing the stars that are visible on a winter evening. I show her Orion; she looks for the Big Dipper; we discuss how star gazers, our name for mappers of the sky, must have lived and worked at night four-hundred years ago.

The sky is skirted along its rim above the horizon, as if a blanket is beginning to grow off of the tangible Earth and toward the dome of atmosphere. It could be frost or ice sparkle, but something of a thin cloud-like band wraps the lower edge of the sky. And then, like an inverted ice cream bowl, the dense gray of the season opens softly across the span and highlights stars against a backdrop that looks more like a negative photo than anything my own eyes could witness.

Cold air has a way of breaking you down. At first, the chill is a thrill, an exhilarating spark of excitement that reminds me of deep, long winters of the 1978 blizzard or the record snowfalls of 1993. The transference of heat through thin cotton sweat pants is no match for the warm barrier provided by a thick, pleated leather jacket yet I feel myself getting cold quickly. I am warm enough to discern the decreasing warmth as we stand and talk.

She remembers a point she had learned in girl scouts – something about seeing from the bottom of a well, a scenario as if you had fallen in; something about stars being brighter even in the middle of the day. It troubles me to think of my kid falling into a well, and I wonder where we even have a such an ancient construct in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.

Becca adds the observation that what we perceive as Orion’s Belt are three stars that are actually millions of miles away from each other. I have three kids. They too will form one identity in my spirit, in my observation, in my life. They already have, yet as their lives go on and forward, they will drift apart and find their own ways, make their own marks, much like the stars. But in a tangible way they will all be part of my personal Orion.

I envy Becca. I didn’t know until I was nineteen what she repeats to me about the stars and about Orion. The clarity of the ages look down at us from illumines millions of miles away, and this observation/writing segment for dad and kid and nature has grown long. We are getting cold, our sentences shorter. The old coat of mine that hangs from her shoulders like a dripping blotch of river-bottom-brown paint is thinner than my jacket. She holds onto the warmth in order to avoid sleep; I hold onto the moment to avoid its passing. There are no wells to drown in, of that much I am certain. A ceiling of stars that have seen the greater magnitude of man’s history will still be here when she lowers me into the Earth some day. My only hope is, that from a grave one can see stars more brilliantly than on any winter night in Pennsylvania.