....and he had always felt safe in her long arms of light.
Nature's Light
They buried her in the city but his grandparents lived in the country. His skin felt numb and cold as cement as he sat on the hill in the dusk and watched the owl that fluttered into Old Doke's barn. There was the sound of cicadas skeeeing in the brush; it was his first night back.
He sat visible, hoping his favorite playmates might happen by or look out of a window and see him, but even that desire dimmed the longer he sat ---how does one inform a friend that your mother has died?
Later after sleeving into a jacket he sat in the warm grasses watching the heavens darken enough to show several deep sky wonders…Stars.
Death had made him cry for his only parent, but now like always the night opened upon him and revived his love of the mother in nature. And it was grand to be out here among the tall grass; for like nature, his mother was a large woman, and he had always felt safe in her long arms.
When they played football she was half tree and he could never quite bring her down. Her athletic muscles bulged on his sweaty cheeks as she drug him to the goal line. The mother he had always known would sometimes bend at night over his bed, her hair would hang like the dark willows and in her eyes he’d see the gleam that planets shine just after sunset on a western sky.
In each of his twelve adventures in life, she would take him places: each summer she drove; he saw the way. He recalled lands patted down with dark green growths, and woods rivered apart by brown fields or sun-brightened gray roads. The skies over these expeditions were limitless, and though the woods being explored may have been thick and deep, nothing seemed larger or more important than the sky---whether filled with day-blue or hazened with star-shine.
While the sky kept deepening, the calls and answers of a hundred serious crickets stereoed in at him. Aldebaran and Thuban began to show and glimmer on the best dark he had seen in a long time. "We are not alone" the movie had said, and looking out into the heavy void he had to hope and agree.
He began to rock slowly, arms around his knees, as he looked back and forth across the infinite distances between constellations, which he called `star friends.' It was then that he heard the sounds of his grandfather's slow heavy tramp, attended by the cadence of pocketed keys. He looked up at the changed man who sat down next to him. The cloud of his pipe smoke settled into the tops of the grasses as a silence stalked their star party. Then he felt the warm arm of experience slide across his shoulders again for the third day in a row.
His grandfather spoke quietly, "See that star ---the big one?"
"Sirius? Yes."
"Can you go there?"
“No.”
"And you don't have to," His Grandpa said, and then he looked up admiringly into the wide deep. "Compared to the vastness of the universe, it's as close as across the road. But all the while you sit here it is coming to you. You see its light. It has sent it; part of it will remain a part of you for as long as you remain on earth. I like to think that all the light sent toward us is part of that birthright, that hugging that Mother Nature does to let us know some of ‘the rest of the story;' coming to us first, from the day we are born, to draw us where she is."
Yes, it was the best dark he'd seen in a long time....
--Dumas fils