The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

Midnight Stars

Most of us these days don’t know anything about the natural world around us.

Unlike our pioneer forefathers who knew all the trees and plants, all the animal tracks

and could “dead reckon” by the stars, we are sadly bereft of native, natural wisdom.

And we’re intimidated by it. Yet it’s easy to recapture our connection to nature.

I started watching the stars long before I knew what any of the constellations

were. Particularly on cold, clear Winter nights. I used to walk along a country road at

midnight and listen to the different crunching noises the frozen snow would make. My

footsteps echoed back from the woods until I would stop, dead still, and listen to the

awesome silence. With no town lights around, I watched the deep black sky and felt

overwhelmed by the millions of points of light whirling in the heavens above. More stars

than grains of sand on a beach. Countless stars. Einstein said, “Not everything that

counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” He could have

been talking about stars, for all I know.

When I finally started to study the stars and learn their names and the names of

their constellations, I had a problem. I could never “see” or remember the constellations

as they were outlined in the backyard astronomy books I read. But then I realized I

didn’t have to. The constellations are really arbitrarily defined groups of stars that only

appear to be related to each other, named thousands of years ago by Greeks and

Romans who are long gone. They named them after what they knew in their

lives—bears, dragons, birds, and the gods they believed were literally in the heavens.

But this is the twentieth century and we have a new sky to live under. So I started

my own constellation naming. When I looked at the Winter night sky years ago and saw

what looked like a big bowtie, I didn’t know that it was “really” Orion. And now I don’t

care because for me it is the Bowtie Constellation. And as I watched what looked like

two mountain peaks circle the Pole star in the Summer sky, I didn’t know it was

Cassiopiea. I called them Cleopatra’s bosom. I have a whole catalog of constellations

now. And it’s wonderfully comforting to watch “my” stars whirling around the heavens

with the same predictability that reassured the ancient Greeks.

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Country Cooking