Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 199

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

When was the last night I looked up and tried to see stars? I can’t remember.

There was a car ride through the mountains. I was 10, maybe 11. My dad was driving the Blue Ridge back down from Knoxville. We were coming back from a visit with my Grandmother.

The mountains aren’t as crowded with electric light. Highways and high homes built to be away from everything, nothing else between the cities. I rolled the window down and stuck my head out. I looked up. It was a broken dish, a chopped oyster, dice and bones, saltwater. There was no black space that stayed black if you watched it long enough. Any and everywhere were stars.

I wonder sometimes why the days feel shorter. Or why I wake up tired. Or how it happens that I’ve packed off a whole year, and another, another…ritz cracker rolls. People tell me it’s just something about getting older. But the Sumerians studied stars for lifetimes, generations, hundreds of years, charting the sky nightly. Did they get tired? Were their years compressed?

There’s a great lie to romanticism: nature’s only beautiful if you have the wealth and means to meet it head on, guard the danger, control it. But even so….

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie