A Speck Called Earth

I learned about the North Star when I was just a boy at Christmas. My dad asked me to help with Christmas lights on the farmhouse roof. The sun had just dipped behind the hills when the last strand was hung. Dad went to grab the extension cord that was already plugged in at the back of the house. He pulled it over to where we were sitting, next to the garret window at the very top.

“Alright,” he said while tying a knot to marry the cords together. “Here goes nothing.”

When the plug went into the extension, the lights gave a warm glow over the dark pastures. We could see the cows and sheep a good distance away.

My dad gave the animals a loud whistle, “HEY!! HOW’S THE VIEW FROM DOWN THERE?!!”

The herd and flock responded in unison, making us both laugh.

Dad tapped my shoulder, “See that there?” he asked, pointing to the stars with a beautiful moon.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Now, point to me the North Star.”

“North Star?” I asked. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Yeah, it’s the one star that doesn’t move,” he said to my blank face. “All the other stars just dance around it.”

All I saw was white dots in the sky.

“See, look,” he said to me as he straightened his arm in front of my face so he could direct me to exactly which one. “That one right there. You see it?”

“How do you know that’s the North Star?” I asked.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said as he bumped my shoulder. He pointed a bit away from the North Star. “You see that little piece of stars? Looks like a cooking pot with a bent handle, right? That there’s the Big Dipper.” He pointed to the front side of the pot. “See those two stars there?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He showed me how the two stars attached to the Big Dipper were a guide to true north. “Those two stars always lead the way.”

“Wow,” I said as I looked in fascination.

“Yep, my daddy taught me that. And now you know,” he said, bumping a finger on my forehead.

“Wait,” I said, still confused. “What do you mean, the other stars dance around it?”

“Well,” it took him a moment to gather how to explain. “Even though it doesn’t look like these stars are moving at all, the Earth is spinning over 800 miles an hour on its axis. So, all these other stars are moving,” he said, waving his hands at the other stars. “‘You’re about to ask why it doesn’t move, right? It’s because the North Star sits right over the top of the world.”

Dad could read the confusion on my face.

“That means, if you and I sat out here, all night, we’d see all the other stars move,” he paused and pointed directly at the North Star. “Except that one right there.”

I sat leaning on Dad, looking up at the stars with his arm around my shoulders. We could have sat up there for hours, without a word being said, with the cool breeze blowing our hair and crickets singing.

Dad sighed. “My daddy stared up at that thing more times than I could count. Any problem he had, I guess that was the cure for it—just looking up, all those years.” He didn’t come off as angry—resentful was a better way to put it.

I looked over to Dad as the dark blue started to paint on his face. “Dad?”

He exhaled and then sniffled, “Yep?”

“Thanks for showing me,” I said.

He looked down to me with a smile. He sniffled again, then said, “Not a problem at all, my boy.” Dad hardly ever showed a soft side. That was one of those rare moments. He pulled my head close and kissed my bowl cut. “Come on, let’s go fix you some supper.”

We both got up from the roof and crawled back through the garret window. I could fit through it, though it was a struggle for adults—roughly the size of a large pizza box. As I grew up, Dad seemed to take every chance he could to look at the stars through that little opening. Through the hard times, looking at the North Star was what felt most humbling.

He had a stroke when I turned 18, and his health went downhill from there. I had to hire a nurse to take care of him after I graduated. I was able to take care of him in the summertime.

The last few months he was alive, he wasn’t the same person anymore.

He would keep repeating things over and over: “North Star’s the place to go—no foolin’—Door’s always open—yessir, that cedar door’s always open—full moon then the cracks, full moon then the cracks—yes indeed…” His stutter was haunting.

Our last conversations circled the same way.

“—oh, just you wait! Moon’s-a-comin’ out tonight, that door’s just gonna pop up, no foolin’—just gonna break open straight away to the North Star, yessiree—just you wait.”

The next morning, I went to help get him out of bed.

He was gone.

No note. No sign of struggle. Nothing. The police searched for weeks. Investigators came and went. But they never found a single lead.

So, I guess I got obsessed with stargazing, all the same. Some nights I would lie in that room, watching the moon and stars. The garret was his favorite room. The moon would shine bright against the wall and slowly shed a dim blue box shape along the cedar wall next to me. The room had a boundary of tranquility that couldn’t be matched outside of it.

The garret was a small room that could hardly fit a twin-sized bed, tucked under the roofing of the farmhouse with a small window. We used it for storage when I was young and cleared it out for Dad when he had his stroke. We added brown carpet to the floor and insulation to the roofing, covering it with cedar planks. The cedar carried a warm scent of sap—dry and smoky, like cinnamon apples over a campfire—the closest thing my memory can name. There was also a small hole in the wall from an old knot in the wood.

Dad had grown up in this house. His father had built it from the ground up and passed away before I was born. It wasn’t a wealthy place, but it was home.

As I lay, a small whirring started to grow into a soft humming against the wall. It didn’t sound like it was on the other side of the wall—more like it was coming from a part of the wall itself. And that’s when I noticed: the sound was coming from the dim outline of the shed in moonlight. The light on the wall slowly became brighter as the ground began to vibrate in unison with the humming behind the cedar. There was no room beyond that wall nor on any other wall in the garret. It was simply a staircase leading to four walls with two of them slanted with the roof, and then—nothing but open air outside.

As the shine on the wall turned brighter, it began to take form into a bigger shape. Bigger than the frame of the window. It shaped itself into the size of…a door. The hole in the cedar began to glow, a piercing white beam stretching across the room. The humming and quakes continued when the hole couldn’t get any brighter—until a quick snap and then—dark and quiet. The humming and shaking stopped.

I stared at the wall in silence, trying to understand what I had witnessed. The wood began to creak like slow steps in a hollow cabin. The creaks turned to cracks and snaps. The planks began to split loudly, each one giving way. The cracks shaped themselves into the outline of the door the moon had shown. When the cracking stopped, the hole in the wall started to glow with a dim light of moonlit snow. That spot in the cedar left a perfect place for a doorknob. I hesitated, then pressed a finger through the hole. It moved. The door slowly opened as a misty cool draft shifted the temperature in the room.

Behind it was the sky not seen from the north-facing window in the garret—it was an entirely different galaxy of stars. Dusty clouds splashed bright violet across a twilight canvas. There was no count to them. A door leading to another universe had opened in the room where my father vanished.

When I stepped closer to the door, it wasn’t just a portrait I could touch. It was an entire new dimension—completely different. The stars grew in number, expanding in countless wonder as I stepped closer, surrounded by brilliant dusty splashes of lavender and northern-light green. Below all those stars sat a familiar image of the roofing on the farmhouse. Our farmhouse. This door didn’t just lead to another dimension—it led to a dimension where our farmhouse roof was the vantage point to the magnificent spectacle above.

All that I saw seemed to give me déjà vu—I was familiar with this very scene. It was like pictures in a book from a distant memory. When I stepped out of the garret and onto the roof, all the sounds I had heard from the garret—from every cricket to every wind-blown whisper—slowly began to absorb into the spatial atmosphere.

“Quite the sight, isn’t it?”

I jumped, shrieking as I turned. I lost my balance and started to fall off the roof when a hand grabbed my shoulder, steadying me. When I saw who it was, I screamed again.

“It’s okay, Son. I know—I know, it’s me,” he said trying to console me. “It’s Dad.”

It was Dad—relaxed, fresh, nothing like the way he was after his stroke or when he disappeared. He was clean-cut and calm—like he was from a whole other world. He grabbed my shoulders and pressed me down. “Now, sit.” And I did.

I was speechless, as if I had seen a ghost. He sat, staring up at the stars. He spoke words to me while I was deafened by shock. His lips were moving but I just heard mumbling. I couldn’t gather words to respond. I could only stare at him in amazement.

When he nudged my shoulder, it shook me out of my spell. He pointed up and said, “See that there?”

He pointed directly to what I knew as the North Star—Polaris. I had seen it countless times. He taught me how to find it, using the Big Dipper as a guide to true North.

“The North Star—”

“EHHHH! Wrong!” he barked like a game show buzzer, bumping my shoulder, making me laugh. He laughed with me and pointed again.

“No, no—that’s Earth, see?…That’s home, believe it or not.”

I stared at what looked like a star from where we were sitting—a pinhole through a sea of black with colorful overcast, surrounded by millions more.

“Wait,” I paused, then pointed. “If that’s Earth, then where is the North Star?”

Dad chuckled. “Get comfortable, my boy! You’re sitting on it.”

I turned my gaze toward the ground below the roofing, looking for our fresh-cut grass and beautiful pastures beyond. But they weren’t there. All that was there was shining lights of dust with hot gas, all pulling the gravity of a single farmhouse held in place.

I watched him lie back on the roof, hands behind his head, sighing as if he just finished a long day’s work. I laid back with him, without a care in the world.

“Do you remember that night?” he asked.

“What night?”

“I showed you how to find it,” he asked. “How to find the North Star?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I do,” I said, without hesitation. “We were putting up Christmas lights, and when we plugged them in, you asked the cows and the sheep how they looked—“

“MUUUURRRRRRRRR—BAAAAAAAAAHHH,” Dad interrupted, making us both laugh. “Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?”

I agreed with laughter, drawing tears in my eyes. There wasn’t any sadness in loss. It was home nestled on a star surrounded by infinite others.

Dad slowly turned his smile into a subtle grin. “I looked up to this thing all those years,” he said, disappointed almost. “I had hopes and dreams for most of it, just like my daddy did,” he paused. Then said, “Failed to see the hopes and dreams that came true down there, back home.”

My smile went away as I couldn’t speak while tears started to make my eyes burn and fall down my face.

He turned to me. “I’m a stubborn man, you know that.” He paused. “But if there’s one thing in the world I’m sorry for … it’s that.” His voice cracked.

My vision blurred with tears, seeing the purple glow of the stars glistening across his face. I wanted to beg him, please, come back home with me.

He interrupted my train of thought as he put his arm around my shoulders and kissed my head. “Ain’t no need to come lookin’ for me anymore, son. I’m sittin’ right here.” He looked back toward the speck called Earth. “Funny… All the problems I had there seemed so big,” he pondered with a grin. “Made me forget how small they were from up here.”

How easy it is, I thought. We fall for making our troubles bigger than they actually are. I looked up with him when he said, “Don’t ignore the world around you down there, son. If you need me… I’ll be right here.”

That was when I woke up in the bed back in the garret in the dark with crickets singing outside the window with navy-blue pastures below, dotted with fireflies drifting in the cool breeze under the pale moon.

I wiped my wet face, got up and stared at the wall, washed in moonlight, waiting for the room to vibrate and the cedar planks to crack again. Waiting for the hidden latch to reveal itself. Hoping to see my dad again. But the room had looked the same as before… with the exception of the smell—that fried apple smell in the cedar. It was gone.

The smell in the garret, now, was old and dusty without its sweet signature. The haven of tranquility I once knew made me come to the realization: He told me, “Ain’t no need to keep lookin’ for me anymore.”

I had been looking for him for years. I had clung to that beautiful smell. A smell in the cedar that reminded me that all was well in the valley. But I was so stubborn that I ignored the fact that the cedar smell died along with him in that room.

I had seen what I needed to see. There would always be time to dwell on what I had lost—but I wasn’t getting any younger.

All that we know and love is held down on a blue ball. And the one thing constant is the North Star. I knew then that all the good in the world cannot be made to stand still in time. I had to let him go.

I walked to the wall, gave it a soft knock as a kiss goodbye, and looked into the dark room where my dad had once slept. Then I headed for the stairs leading down, a lump rising in my throat, knowing this would be my last time here. Behind me, I wanted to hear the faint whirring and humming to begin and see the walls crack. But I knew that I was better, knowing that the dreams I had were just a fool’s bliss. So I kept walking, stepping out of the garret, with broad shoulders and my soul smiling, without a care in the world.