The Night the Stars Came Down to the Pond
a small summer miracle, witnessed by two
It was the kind of summer night that asks you to come outside.
The pond was very still. The crickets were tuning up. The big oak tree behind the barn was holding its breath the way old trees sometimes do.
Little Sister Pig and Middle Brother had come down to the pond with a single jar between them. Middle Brother brought his guitar, because of course he did. Little Sister brought a question.
"Can stars get down?" she asked.
"Down where?"
"Down here."
Middle Brother thought about it. He was learning, slowly, that some questions are like gates you should open carefully, in case there is something on the other side.
"Maybe," he said.
So they sat. He strummed something quiet. The pond, which is a polite pond, did not interrupt.
And then Little Sister gasped, because the pond was full of stars.
Hundreds of them. Right there. Floating on the water. Some bright, some shy, some bobbing gently as if they had paddled all the way there.
"They came!" she whispered.
(They were reflections, of course. But this is not a story about of course. This is a story about the pond on a summer night.)
Middle Brother set down his guitar. They lay back on the warm grass and watched the stars in the water and the stars in the sky and could not, even with effort, tell the difference.
A bullfrog said something deep and unhurried.
A firefly drifted by, a little late to its own party.
The wind walked once across the field.
"Do you think the stars do this every night?" asked Little Sister.
"I think," said Middle Brother, "they only come down when somebody comes out to look."
She thought about that for a long while.
Eventually they walked home slow, the jar empty (you cannot, it turns out, fit a star in a jar — but it is okay to try). The kitchen window was glowing. Mama waved from the porch. Papa was already snoring in the big chair.
Little Sister put her boots by the door, the way she always did, two sizes too big and pointing at the ceiling.
That night she fell asleep with the curtains open, just in case.