The Stars

When I was a young girl my parents would lay out on a blanket with all of us in the back yard and look at the night sky. My dad would point out the easy constellations and my mother would find a few of the more difficult to recognize constellations, planets, and stars. The real excitement of course were the satellites. We would keep count, and comment on brightness, speed, direction, and duration of visibility until we couldn't make our eyes focus anymore. When I lived in Oklahoma I took the kids on a few road trips back home to Oregon because I just couldn't stay away in the summer. I like to get parks passes and camp my way across the country because it is cheap and an adventure. Particularly with three children ranging in age between three and nine. On this one trip we went down through Colorado, went through the Garden of The Gods(bought them all Kazoos at the gift shop. What WAS I thinking?!) Hit many road side attractions, bug museums and the like, camped at Mesa Verde, and got to the Grand Canyon the next day. I'd lived in Oregon and in Oklahoma and nothing in either of those states had prepared me for the clarity of star gazing that lack of humidity could provide. It was a divine experience. In the gift shop I found a book on constellations by H.A. Rey called simply "The Stars" and my children and I lived with it for the rest of our trip and still pull it out today. "This book is meant for people who want to know just enough about the stars to be able to go out at night and find the major constellations, for the mere pleasure of it." Is the opening passage. And that's what it is. That is all that it is. Beautifully simple and engaging.