Skyward

Photo by Samuele Bertoli on Unsplash

Yesterday started very early. I had a 7 a.m. appointment in Columbus with my oncologist, which meant getting up at 5:30 to be on the road by 6:15.  I dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen. Waiting for Warren to come down, I stepped out on our back deck to see how much the temperature had dropped overnight. It was still dark with no hint of sunrise, so I looked up to see if there were any stars visible.

There were stars and there was Orion, hanging in the northeast sky, brilliantly lit. It was my first fall sighting of it.

Orion is my favorite constellation. Robert Frost put Orion in his poem "The Star-splitter," which has been a longtime treasured poem in my mental poetry collection: "You know Orion always comes up sideways..." Orion is one of the very few constellations I can readily identify, which is certainly a part of why it is my favorite. And way back in my misty past, I first saw and had someone identify Orion in a brilliantly dark Wisconsin night sky, seeing it from the outside walk surrounding the telescope dome at Yerkes Observatory. That first view of Orion, of knowing what I was looking at, has stuck with me.

I called Warren outside to see Orion and we both marveled at the sky. Then we went on with our morning.

The time came for Warren to head to class, I walked outside with him to give him a kiss and wave goodbye; both are important to us. When I turned to go back into the house, I noticed a moth resting on the lintel between the storm door and the house door. It must have fluttered on it when we stepped out. I opened the storm door wider: "Go on, little moth. You don't need to be in our house." 

It was then that I noticed that one of the moth's wings was badly damaged, almost as if something had bit a chunk out of it. 

Oh. I figured I would have to pick it up and set it on a bush.

The moth had other ideas. When I bent closer, it fluttered up off the lintel and flew into the front yard, heading towards one of the flower beds. True, it flew in a jagged, erratic fashion, but fly it did. 

That moth made an impression on me. "That's me," I thought. Or rather, I hoped that was me: yes, damaged but still able to move forward. Maybe jagged and erratic at times, but still going.

Orion in the morning and a moth giving me a lesson in flying midday. And all I had to do was look up.