Winter Sky

What my father taught me to see in the dark.

I’m calling them “Star Walks.” I leave the house after dinner bundled in a winter coat, hat, mittens and start down our quiet street. Most houses are lit for Christmas with candles, red and green lights, icicles hanging from the porch.

As I walk, I look at the warm glow in the windows, trees positioned to be seen from the inside and out, extra cars in the driveway belonging to college-aged kids home for Christmas. Overhead the ink-black fabric of sky and a billion pinpricks of light.

Our road runs east to west almost exactly. I walk west at first so when I turn toward home Orion is framed by the towering white pines along the road, rising in the east. I know the three-star belt, the sword, arms and legs outstretched. Aside from the Dippers, it is the only constellation I can find in the night sky.

My father taught me how to see it, how out of those billions of pinpricks something familiar could take shape. Something that would be there over and over and over again. As a child I must have spent enough time outside in the winter at night to learn this, although I don’t remember the exact moments.

It could have come on the nights when we stacked wood in the dark of our driveway, my father, my brother and me. Log after log into a neat row that my father would cover with a blue tarp. The wood heated the first level of our home. A giant black wood stove set atop a stage of bricks. My father taught me how to build a proper fire in that stove. How to open the flue, how to coax the smoke up the chimney, stack the kindling just so to allow for plenty of air, light the edge of the crumpled newspaper.

Or maybe our starry lesson came on the nights when we went out to skate on the rink he’d made us out of clear plastic sheeting rimmed with logs from that same wood pile. I was seven, maybe eight. When I ask my parents about these memories, theirs is as fuzzy as my own. We did the rink one winter? Maybe two? No one knows.

Maybe on these nights my father paused, between the stacking and the skating, tell us to look up. And we’d follow the point of his finger reaching toward the night sky, helping us find the belt, the sword, the trios of stars.

Sometimes I drag my own family out into the night. The sunset! The moon! The stars! I’ve pointed out Orion from the car, but we were moving, driving too quickly down the road for the kids to see from the back seat. Too quickly to make something familiar out of an infinitely impossible landscape—the night sky is like that.

I wonder if my children will remember this about me, the way I’m always making them look at what nature has on offer.

This is what I remember from my childhood: my father teaching, leading us in lessons of awe. Orion, yes. But also the way he would, on the first snow of the year, turn all the lights off in the house, make us gather quietly around the sliding glass door after dinner. A single light bulb above the deck illuminating the falling flakes. All we could hear was our own breathing. And then into the silence my father would recite “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the familiar phrases piercing the silence. A comfort. A sign. Winter had arrived.

There’s something about the darkness of winter that drives us towards familiar things. Nostalgia. Home. Towards the light, too. The snowflakes and the stars: tiny tokens of eternity.

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Orion’s Belt

A poem for my father.

“Look there,” my father says.

Three stars.

A belt.

It is cold, nose frosted,

fingers numb.

The winter sky black,

pinpricks of eternity

shining through.

The only constellation I know.

I tell my children now,

of the three stars:

the belt

the sword

repeating my father’s words.

The warrior in the winter sky.