Still Falling All Around

I had a new home in my remembering/ and it was dark and safe and beautiful/ with shooting stars still falling all around.-Pat Schneider

My daughter left Sunday morning and the rest of the day was strange. Monte called it a re-set, and I think of it as a bridge, but it was a day of lull and transition, and now it’s just the two of us again. The last week was a whirlwind that included a reunion of relatives, a retirement party for a dear friend, and a beach wedding at which I was stung (several times!) by a wasp.

And suddenly the good-bye arrived, and I lay awake last night distracted by the itching and ouch of the wasp stings and the old twinge in my heart.  An absence briefly filled has now resumed, and it’s time to get used to that all over again.

I'll be fine. Hell-bent on seeing shooting stars, I made a palette of blankets for myself on the deck and have been staring at the sky.

"Wanna come outside and watch shooting stars with me?" I asked Monte earlier.

"Oh yes," he said. "I'll be with you in spirit."

So the stars are glinting bright above the hills, the Milky Way is a swathe of chalky light, and shadowy treetops are dancing in the wind.  Now and then a meteor streaks across the heavens, gone in an instant. 

“Night. How the stars came down
arching over us, and the only name
we had for them was shooting stars.
Why there were so many was anybody’s guess.
My great grandmother thought the world
was coming to an end when Haley’s comet
flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back
and watched the night sky falling
all around me and I wanted,
more than anything, never to go home.
I did, of course. They put us campers into busses
and drove us back to tenements,
asphalt and streetlights in the city.
What I didn’t know that night
in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp
was that when I got home,
home wasn’t my real home any more.
I had a new home in my remembering
and it was dark and safe and beautiful
with shooting stars still falling all around.”

— Pat Schneider