Smitten by starlight

I fell in love with the winter stars before I even learned to read. As with so many of my formative memories, it happened at my grandparents’ big red house on Buzzards Bay. There were not so many year-round residents at the shore in those days, and not much of a glare to smother the sky. Around the December holidays, the stars were sharp as oyster shells, and bright as the light on Cleveland East Ledge, pulsing offshore.

I remember a night when the house could not contain us, and we stepped outside to the silver lure of starlight. I was a little boy of 3 or 4, in snow pants and handmade mittens, and my father and grandfather showed me the stars. We went around to the dark side of the house, the cold half shut off for the season, and turned toward Orion rising over Cape Cod.

This quarter of the sky is richly endowed in stars that are among the brightest we can see with unaided eyes. I was guided to each and given their names: Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, Rigel, Betelgeuse.

There were the Gemini (Pollux and Castor), and the Pleiades like a cloud of fireflies just beyond Taurus. There was the studded belt and sheath knife of Orion the hunter with his dogs at heel.

The sky crackled like the frost underfoot while, above the house, a few vagrant sparks cleared the chimney. It was too cold to linger, but I yearned to stay, with my small hand wrapped in one of their large ones, my free hand tracing the contours of those constellations.

On Monday or Tuesday night next week if the weather holds, I will take my children out and show them the same stars. On Dec. 13 and 14, the annual Geminid meteor shower is predicted to peak at a rate of up to 140 an hour. It will be too cold for us to count that many, but it only takes a moment to make a memory.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.