My favorite moment with Harper this year happened in the middle of the night in Boone, NC in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She’d been fighting an ear infection, and before she’d gone to bed that night, Jesse was explaining that there would be a meteor shower shortly after midnight – stars burning up faster than you can blink your eyes and shooting across the sky.
“Will you wake me up Daddy?” I want to see it,” she told him.
And it’s not that Jesse forgot, or chose not to. I’m not sure he made a decision at all. To say he agonized over what to do is probably dramatic, but she was sick, and she was in pain, and waking her up in the middle of the night for a chance to see a star’s last gasp turned out to be a tough decision to make. There’s no parental manual for taking your child into the dark in the hope of witnessing what glimmers.
I suppose she made the decision for us. She came into our bedroom, holding Bear and sobbing. “Daddy,” she said, “you told me you’d wake me up!” And so it went that the three of us quietly pulled on sweatpants and sweatshirts and snuck out of the sleeping house to search for the stars.
The night was clear and the stars cut through the black sky like diamonds and I was afraid of bears and also pumas and ticks and mosquitoes – all creatures great and small could get us in our hunt for what shines at night. Harper sat in the middle of the back seat, her eyes fixed on the sun roof. She looked like a Charlie Brown character about to sing a Christmas carol.
When Jesse pulled to a lookout spot on what felt like the edge of a cliff and stopped the car, Harper was the first one out, still holding Bear, still looking up.
The thing of it is, I’m not really sure what I’m looking for when I’m standing in the dark, and I’m not sure what to tell Harper to look for, either. How do you describe what sparkles unexpectedly in the dark? Should you be afraid of it? Reach out for it? Does it change you? Should you understand what the light is and what it does? What if you never see it? What if you’ve brought your sick kid into the wild with the darkness and the bears and you never see a thing? You never understand any of it?
That didn’t happen. We saw the burning stars like paintbrushes in need of gold paint – like the ends of fireworks – shoot across the sky. Each of us saw them at different times and rarely did we see what the other saw, though we frantically tried to show each other.
It was the watching and the waiting I want to remember. It is Harper’s quiet, steady breathing, her clutching Bear as she looked up – never asking once what exactly to look for. She wasn’t concerned whether she’d see light. She just wanted the chance to search.
Happy 11th birthday Harper Anne, my Maria. May you always be willing to search.
Leave a Reply