The stars of the summer night.

Do you remember as a child, sitting in the grass on a summer night and watching for “shooting stars?” We made a game of it. On seeing one (and it often turned out to be just a lightning bug) we would shout “money, money, money!” If we got it out before the tail of the meteor faded it meant that we were coming into a fortune. This is truly believed!

I grew up in a small Kansas town. During those dust bowl years the summer heat was unrelenting. My mother, sister, and I spent most of the daytime hours in the basement where we had fashioned a sitting room from odd bits of furniture. Around five in the evening my dad came home from work, wilted and tired. Only then would we emerge from the coolness into what probably was the worst heat of the day.

After supper it was my job to prepare the yard for the evening. By July the grass was dead but we kept a portion watered so as to give us one small green oasis. After soaking myself and the ground with a garden hose, I sat up the folding steamer chairs in a circle. As darkness fell we gathered there – sometimes with friends and neighbors – and began our nightly vigil.

The birds took one last drink at their bath, called softly to each other, then went to roost. The crickets and the locusts struck up their chorus. The stars came out.

The resident cat sat under my chair until his golden eyes saw something in the night. A sudden leap and a shrill cry told us he had caught the locust.

None of us knew much about astronomy but we could always pick out the Milky Way (I thought it was named after a candy bar), and the Big and Little Dipper. Sometimes we saw a sheet or “heat” lightning in the distance giving promise of rain that never came, at least not until autumn.

One night that I will always remember we witnessed a total eclipse of the moon. . .a full moon in a cloudless sky. It took a matter of hours and at the moment of totality, it hung there like a huge copper penny suspended in the heavens. There was the night, too, when a pink-white fireball came streaking out of the west low in the sky. It disappeared below the horizon with a great flash. Its flowing tail lingered in the sky for some time but so awed by it were we, no one remembered to call out “Money, money, money!”

Precisely at 10 o’clock my father would yawn and say, “I’m going to bed.” This was the signal for us to put on our flimsy nightwear and begin the search for a bearable place to sleep. Often it was on a blanket outdoors or on the floor in front of an open doorway--anywhere that a breeze might stir the stifling air.

I like to think that in the quiet place of my childhood, they are shining still, watched by younger and brighter eyes- constant and eternal- the stars of the summer night.