Mourning Star

In southern Missouri, there is a two lane road that stretches south. State Route 63 winds quietly through the hamlets and townships of rural America, occasionally passing through relative population centers. It passes churches, farms, VFW posts, and countless county roads. Twelve miles south of the town of Rolla, Missouri, and a rifle shot past the Little Piney River, 63 will bring you to a sign for the Philadelphia Baptist Church. You have found County Road 7490.

A few miles down this gravel road you will drop in to a deep valley where the air is cooler and the trees are greener. In this valley is a little patch of property that has been in my family for the last thirty years. Here, I have grown up, grown old, been lost, and been found anew. It is the place where my family gathered throughout my youth to be a family. The sandy soil is rich with sweat of our brow, stained with our blood, and renewed by those of us that are buried in the hill across the creek.

Sometimes the trip down Country Road 7490 was taken in the impenetrable dark of a rural summer night. The headlights of the family van only cut the darkness a few dozen yards, and beyond that the world may have dropped off into an endless void for all I knew. The gnawing anxiety of the unknown stirred in my belly in those moments and sometimes I would close my eyes and pray that we would make it safely to the valley. It was a childish fear, I know, but one I had all the same. We'd skid and rattle down the road, with rocks pinging off the undercarriage and the tires hopping along the washboard hard pack.

On one of the blackest nights I can remember, we made our way down what is locally know as Corn Creek Road to the valley. I lay curled up on the rear bed that my parents had built into the van. I looked out the back window of the van, watching the dust swirl in the wake of our travels. The dust was illuminated red by the tail lights of the van and looked like angered ghosts reaching out to drag us into their collective damnation. I rocked in uneasy time with the van and listening to the loose rocks hammering away beneath me.

There was a sudden drop in my stomach as we crested the last hill and sank into the valley and I felt relief. After a few more moments, we slowed and I felt the van turn onto the property. When I felt the brrrrap of the tires crossing the cattle grate that marked the entrance of our family's land, I sat up and prepared to get out. When the van came to a stop, I pulled the latch on the door and stepped out onto the dew covered ground. The cold, humid air fell over me like a wet washcloth, and I let out a long foggy breath. Craning my neck, I looked up into the night sky while my family scattered about to mingle with the clan.

I looked into that night sky and felt the awe and wonder of something I'd never seen before. I climbed onto the roof of the van with a blanket and pillow to lay under the brightest and clearest views I've ever had of the Milky Way.

I lay there for an amount of time that I cannot define. I stared at the bright band of white that reached across the sky and felt infinitely small. Before me lay the entire universe, with millions of stars, and countless worlds across immeasurable distances. But as distant as they were, I felt as if I could simply extend my arms and caress them with my fingertips.

I dozed off sometime later and awoke in the very predawn hours to see only a few of those stars remaining. Assuredly, they had been there before, and yet I had not seen them. I knew that they had not been so obvious simply because they'd been drowned out in the sea of stars that I'd been looking at just a few hours before. I lamented that it had taken me so long to see them, even though they'd been right in front of me the whole time. Something so beautiful and distinct deserved recognition sooner. I dozed again, and by the time I opened my eyes the sun had peeked over the trees and my stars were gone. I have not seen them again so clearly since.

As I've grown older, the darkness has sometimes become figurative. With the inexperience of life sometimes come the trials. And in the blackness of those trials, sometimes innumerable  lights appear. They may only be pinpoints in the dark, but you can see them. And sometimes they seem close enough to touch. In my own times of darkness, I've reached out for them and found them beyond my reach, just like the stars that painted the sky of my valley.

And one by one, those stars disappeared.

The people that come into our lives in those dark times can seem beautiful for a time. But I've found that they are only around when things are the darkest. And then there are the ones that persist into the dawn. They hang there, waiting, watching over you until you find the light once again. The are the brightest and most beautiful stars in your sky, but it is not until all of the others who, too dim to be of consequence at any other time, have faded away that you take notice.

I know that I have often failed to acknowledge those who hold vigil with me through the dark, but I feel their light upon me constantly. Feeling weightless and infinitely small is a lonely time, to be sure, and having a star to defiantly twinkle when all others had gone their way was a blessing. And when the night falls, as it often does, know that star will be there, waiting out the darkness until we are once again a light of our own.