We had fast food tonight: the whole enchilada, or rather, bacon cheeseburgers, enormous shakes and oodles of fries with fancy ketchup. We’d eaten well the last few days: spelt spaghetti, chicken fajitas (with those incredible local-to-Redding handmade corn tortillas and
queso fresca), but we had someplace to go. After spending three days putting in twelve hour days in 100+ degree weather (hey, it’s August in Redding, what did I expect?), running boxes to Mom’s new condo, assembling the inexplicably complicated itty-bitty pieces of hardware that make up closet systems and dealing with a stable of incredibly inept contractors, I felt we deserved some time off.
Which is why I found myself driving past my junior high (Parsons, home of the Tigers) to Dude’s Drive-In for an embarrassment of calories, and running back to the discombobulated house that Mom will call home for a few more weeks. After we finished stuffing our faces—even Number One had trouble with the obscenely huge shake—we piled into our tiny rental car and headed for the hills.
Our destination was our little square of the Mother Lode, 20 acres between Oak Run and Buzzard’s Roost. There’s really nothing there. Except the cabin we built together when we were kids, and the garage and shop my dad built by himself (before the power company deigned to grant us a pole and meter). And then there are trees. Hundreds of teenaged trees, planted as babies by my father. I hadn’t realized just how many it was until I realized that they had grown so tall that they interfered with our reason for the trip: the Aurigid meteor shower, expected to peak at 4:36 in the morning of September 1, our Star Daughter’s birthday.
We hit the red dirt of Old Stage Road just as the sun was dipping below the hills to the west, and opened up the place and made up beds before it got too dark. It’s cooler up there, in the nineties instead of over 100, but the room was stuffy, and I hadn’t bothered to perform the ritual that turns on the PGE meter. I gave the boys the grand tour, such as it is (“here’s the cabin, here’s the outhouse, here’s the rocky hill, these are trees your grampa planted.”). We sat outside for a spell, listening to the breeze in the treetops, watching bats catch mosquitoes and drinking our chilled coolers before they lost their chill. Then I set the alarm for 4 a.m. and we went to bed.
When it sounded, we groggily pulled on our pants and opened the door. We were greeted by deliciously cool night air, delicate shadows cast by moonlight and a shooting star streaking overhead, along with the ubiquitous musical crickets and frogs. We plopped down on the bench (on the cool side of the garage) and gazed up, to be rewarded by a few more. And then nothing for a while. Scanning the horizon, we could sort of see a few through the thicket, so we headed down to the main road, where there are fewer trees. We were rewarded by several more, and just about the time Little One was saying he was sleepy and Darling Husband was ready to join him, we all looked up at Cassiopeia one last time. For it is in that constellation that a star is named for our daughter, who would have been eight years old today. And there it was, one last falling star to put in our pockets. We’ll save the warmth for a rainy day.
