When You Wish Upon a Star.

Holding forever beneath the stars

When you wish upon a star,
Makes no difference who you are,
Anything your heart desires,
Will come to you.

In the cradle of rural South Dakota stood a little white farm house, a quaint, pure white tooth rising from a yellowed pasture where a porchlight guided our way and bid us welcome from our travels.

My grandparents lived there once, far out in the boondocks, tucked so quietly away from the world that the hours seemed to slow just by crossing the fence line. No hurry. No rush. The kind of place most folks would pass without ever noticing. Maybe that was the point.

The place long announced itself before it came into view. I knew it by the rumble under tire as the asphalt finally retreated to gravel roads once we turned south off of the highway. Worn country roads pressed and re-pressed by a million passes held a thousand memories of their own, making the way feel familiar even before the house ever appeared.

That, and of course, the familiar stench of cow manure radiating through the pasture. “Money” my grandfather used to call it. After a bit, it too became familiar and lost some of its potency.

I perceived it all so well, being a kid and all. Kids just seem to have a way with intuition that somewhere or other we seem to lose or leave behind as we age.

Very likely, my grandmother would be inside the kitchen whipping up her famous Goulash — a sophisticated Midwestern catch-all term for cuisine containing noodles, tomatoes, and ground beef (if you know you know) — and somewhere or another my grandfather would be out in the fields in a tractor, chugging his way back up to the house.

Simple. Routine. Sacred in its own quiet way.

After dinner the daylight would say goodnight and out would come the stars in their splendor.

After dinner the daylight would slip out, leaving the sky to open wide. He and I would sit out on the patio, polypropylene chairs creaking under us as we leaned back to watch the stars take their places. Sometimes I’d end up in his lap. He’d trace the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, the long arc toward The Pleiades, pointing with a finger still crusted in dirt from a hard day’s work.

It would be quiet, him and I. Only the occasional brush of the night breeze or distant lowing of cattle would disturb the stillness. I’d try to capture it with my old flip phone, thumb smudging at buttons, zooming and unzooming, trying to hold beauty still. It never worked. He’d eventually lower my hands and lift my gaze.

There’s a life lesson there I think. About approaching beauty, I mean.

How it refuses to be managed or stored away.
How it asks you to show up and let it pass through you.

Time works the same way.

Time, like beauty, is given worth in its passing.

Ya better get it while its good kid, cause before you know it, its gone and you’re left with memories.

My grandma and grandpa have been gone over ten years now, and I still think about those nights looking at the stars.

The Northern Lights recently were visible all across the Midwest, including my grandparents’ farm, where my dad now lives since there passing. He sent me this picture.

---

History loops.
Wisdom lingers.
Some things never go stale.

“Dad, can we go outside and look at the stars?”

I didn’t think much of it. Like most parents, by the day’s end I had bags under my eyes, a dull ache in my joints, brain fog thick as dusk. As I unloaded my kids from their car seats in our midnight-black Traverse, my son wriggled free and ran to his sister, both of them gathered on the driveway, staring skyward.

Irritated, I tried ushering them inside, cold air nipping at my tiredness.

“But dadddd, I want to go see the stars tonight!” my oldest pleaded.
Her brother quickly joined in.

“Yes, Dad—pweeze go see stars?”

The “no” was halfway from my lips when I hesitated. Something caught in my throat. If they had turned their gaze, I’m quite sure they would have seen right through me.

In an instant, I saw myself in them: transfixed to the sky, making something lasting out of the brief shimmer of celestial lights and the fragile temporality that holds them.

As you can probably imagine, it wasn’t long before we were in the car again, leaving the city behind to chase infinity and memories.

Asphalt gave way to gravel as they hooted and hummed, bantering over when we’d be there or what we might see. From the driver’s seat, I watched the urban glow retreat, the heavens slowly unfurling into a tapestry above us, like a grand gate awaiting our arrival.

We found a quiet dead-end road fifteen miles from town. I parked, lifted them out of their car seats and onto my lap and it was silent.

Stretched before us was the lengths of the cosmos, on display for those crazy enough to look for it. Their eyes glistened and sparkled, mirroring the dancing night sky.

I traced the paths from my childhood; Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and even a cluster making up the Milky Way. A satellite drifted across the hemisphere, slow and sure, and every so often a soft blush of yellow or pink flickered where a shooting star had already burned out, leaving only its afterglow to prove it had ever existed. There and gone in a blink.

My son’s excitement pulled me back.

“Daddy look!! A choo-choo train!!”

Something I had never seen before was slowly slipping into sight from the west, like a celestial locomotive.

And I may be no astrologist, but I knew we had seen Starlink.

Here’s my attempt at capturing Starlink. As you can imagine, the actual moment was infinitely more glorious. Sometimes we never quite learn to just enjoy the moment though, do we?

Before it had even registered in my brain, my phone was out, trying to hold onto the moment, capture lightning (or Starlink) in a bottle.

My grandfather’s voice came back to me, from all those nights long ago: time doesn’t stop, beauty doesn’t wait, it passes through you or it doesn’t pass at all.

My eyes blurred as I set the phone aside and pulled my children close, remembering him while savoring this new chance to do what he once did for me, knowing these moments would slip away far too soon—

but the memories etched under the stars would remain, woven into our hearts, waiting quietly to be seen when we would be still enough to look.