When I was a girl, I would often sit atop a picnic table in our back yard at night, star gazing and contemplating. Perhaps it was odd, perhaps lots of people have done it, but I would have conversations with my adult self. I would imagine my life twenty or so years in the future and tell myself to never forget those silent moments with the stars.
I almost did forget. Just like any grown up, I got busy. I stay busy. I see nothing but great expanses of busy spread before me like some percolating landscape of what I need to do, what I want to do, and what I must get done. When your nose is pointed in the direction of your frantic footsteps, it is easy to lose sight of the heavens. Stars? What stars? All I see are ruts in the road.
A good friend of my family, Tommie Thompson, is in her eighties. She has lived her life in such a way that I cannot imagine she has any regrets. She studied and became a nurse anesthetist back when women did not aspire to such things. She tells great stories of having to move cows from the road in her treks from hospital to hospital in the wee hours of the morning. She wrenched a gorgeous plot of waterfront land from a thicket atop a hill on the Biloxi River and built her home with a view of a cozy bayou that never fails to take my breath away each time I see the sun rest on its horizon.
Over the years, she has been busy. She has fished the rivers near her home until I guarantee you there is not a sandbar on which her two-seater boat has not harbored at least a few times. She has cleaned literally thousands of mullet and bream and fried them to perfection on her back porch while puffing a cigarette and sipping a martini. Tommie has always made the most of what she had, never wasted so much as a thread, and has taken great pleasure in things like good weather, old friends and a faithful rod and reel. While she has always been a woman of action, she is also a grateful and faithful observer of life and its blessings. Sometimes I envision her casting out across familiar waters and pulling in a spectacular star.
After a recent trip to my childhood Coastal home, I felt pangs of homesickness that the salt air awakens each time I am there. Without really thinking about it, I stepped outside in the brisk evening breeze and gazed up at the lights in the sky. My stargazing sent me back in time, embracing that younger, more hopeful me. I promised her that I would spend more moments like that, looking up, instead of down.
It is a good way to start a new year, I think, paying little attention to the ruts in the road and praising the beauty of stars.