AUGUST 17, 2026 – Yesterday at midnight, after everyone else was sound asleep and Byron himself was about to head off to Nod, I said, “I’m going out to the dock to check out the stars.”
“I’ll join you,” he said.
I was glad he wanted to—without having to be invited.
Together we strolled out to what on such evenings is a perfect astronomical viewing platform. Given the late hour, the Milky Way had wandered to the southwest from due south, where at this time of year, it appears soon after dark. As the minutes passed, our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and against the black velvet background, a million more diamonds appeared.
In silence, we gazed in awe at the celestial light show. Eventually, Byron was the first to talk.
“I realize that Diogo hasn’t seen stars like this. He’s always been put to bed before it’s completely dark outside.”
This remark prompted recollection of one of my earliest memories: sleeping out on the sun deck on top of the porch of our family’s house. As usual, I was following the trail blazed by my two older sisters; when I turned four, I was allowed to join them. Deploying the old fashion method of blowing into an opening with a removable plug, Dad inflated an air mattress and my mother rolled out a kid-sized sleeping bag. My sisters, meanwhile, rounded up flashlights and bug spray. Before dark, we crawled into our sleeping bags and waited for the stars to come out. Our parents checked on us a couple of times before they themselves retired to their bedroom, through which we gained access to the porch roof.
For my sisters and me, sleeping outside high above the yard was a great adventure. Watching the stars come out was . . . well . . . other worldly. My sisters seemed to know a lot about what was going on up there—stars and planets, they explained, which from the rooftop of the porch, were indistinguishable from the stars. In size and character, however, stars and planets were worlds apart. Whether planets or stars, the gleaming diamonds up there were arranged in “constellations,” I was told, which had names, starting with the Big Dipper. I couldn’t keep up with all the constellations they seemed to know—or pretended to identify—so I made up my own.
Eventually, we fell sound asleep, but I remember waking up hours later, when my parents’ bedroom lights were off, and the only noise I heard was crickets chirping in the darkness of the warm summer night. After checking to see that my sisters were asleep, I’d look up at the stars alone, as if I were not a little boy anymore but a big kid, closer to the ages of my older siblings. I felt braver too, looking up at the nighttime sky on my own. The longer I looked at the stars, the more they held some entrancing power, as I contemplated their uncountable numbers and extreme distances from the porch roof.
Once I’d proved that I could handle a night out on that roof, I was invited back. Few if any other interactions with my two older sisters made me feel more grown-up than when they accommodated me in their overnight stargazing. In time, at our new house—on the larger, more substantial sundeck but over the double-car garage instead of a small screened porch—I would lead my own nights-out-on the sundeck, first with my younger sister Jenny, then with school chums.
All those childhood nights sleeping under the stars left a deep impression that remains with me to this day. I didn’t become an astronomer, an astronaut, an astrophysics, a philosopher, or a theologian, but in an almost childlike manner, I would be forever awe-inspired by the beauty and mystery of the heavens.
So it was yesterday evening as I, now an aging man, stood beside my son, himself a father, and took in the majesty of the stars (and planets) shining down on this precious orb of ours.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
