A Symbiotic Relationship

I often think about people like Stu and how much they miss due to not looking up. My husband and I craned our necks to look at the sunset as we drove home from shopping. Stu is our neighbor who dutifully tends to his land and livestock. He is always banging away at something, pulling produce from the Earth, an expert on land-craft, belonging in overalls. My husband is aware that a good homesteader keeps an eye to the sky, but my husband is also a man who plans vacations that revolve around looking up.

Our first trip together consisted of traveling through New England to hike with the penultimate perk of seeing the aurora in Baxter State Park in Maine. But there was no aurora. Our trips out west to the high deserts consisted of telephoto lenses and dark skies. At a campground outside Crater Lake in Oregon I froze and batted away hungry mosquitoes to the cadence of his camera clicking away at the Milky Way. We had a whirlwind weekend in the south where we stood in the loud silence of daylight crickets during the solar eclipse. We got engaged under the Lyrid meteor shower as I poured liquid stars into champagne flutes. We installed cameras outside more for a view of the sky than for security. Today he sent me a recording of a starling murmuration that took place above our yard. He married someone who spends a lot of time researching and waxing poetic about the ground. While he adjusts lenses pointing towards the heavens, I'm lifting rocks or on my haunches figuring out a flower.

We help each other to see and appreciate the world. I have always loved weather and have learned more than anyone needs to know about clouds and dew points because of him. And because of me, the winged beings outside our windows at home are no longer just birds to him, but red winged blackbirds, chickadees, and orioles.