Look Up

Once, in a valley where the mountains kept watch,

a mama was given stars.

Not the far-off kind.

The small, warm, wriggling kind

that fit in the crook of her arm

and smelled like sunshine and sleep.

She did not hand them off to anyone.

She kept them home and taught them herself,

seven years of kitchen-table mornings,

letters traced in flour,

fractions cut from pancakes,

co-op days and field trips

that always seemed to end knee-deep in a creek.

She took them up the trails before their legs were long enough,

carried them when they quit,

cheered when they didn't.

She put them on skis and let them fall

and taught them the getting-up part.

She spread paper across the table

and let them paint the sky any color they wanted.

They left glitter on everything,

fingerprints, mud, sticky kisses, paint on the dog,

and she let it stay.

She never needed them tidy.

The mess was the magic,

and she loved every speck of it.

She was the kind of mama who packed for weather.

Flashlights by the door. Water in the truck.

A radio on the shelf, charged and ready.

She taught them to find north by the stars

and to always, always have a way to call home.

But there was weather in that valley,

and it wasn't hers.

Anyone who has wintered here knows the kind.

The grey that rolls down off the ridges and sits,

day after day,

pressing the whole valley flat beneath it.

It crept in under the door

and whispered, hold this together.

Keep it whole. Do it for them.

So she stood in the doorway and held it.

Shoulders square, feet planted,

pushing back against a sky that wasn't hers to carry,

because she believed a family was worth the fight.

And while she was busy holding up the weather,

the stars kept being stars.

They learned to climb trees and tie shoes,

to read, to run, to be brave, to be kind.

They grew brighter and brighter

in a sky she couldn't always see.

Some nights she did look up,

and those nights shine in her memory like lanterns.

Other nights the grey was too thick.

She carries those now. She knows every one by name.

She could have stayed there.

Plenty do. The grey gets familiar.

You stop remembering the sky was ever blue.

She did not stay.

She did what every mountain kid in this valley knows to do

when the inversion settles in.

She laced up her shoes,

and she climbed.

Up past the cold, past the tree line of her own excuses,

lungs burning, legs shaking,

one switchback at a time,

until she broke through the top of it

and the grey lay spread out beneath her like a sea.

And above it,

spread across the whole wide sky,

were her stars.

Not little anymore.

Blazing. Wild. Beautiful. Their own.

She wished with everything in her

that she had climbed sooner.

She whispered I'm sorry to the night,

and meant it all the way down to her bones.

But here is the thing about stars.

They don't stop shining because someone was standing in the fog.

They wait.

They burn.

They are still right there when you finally lift your eyes.

So hear me, my stars:

I will not go back down into the grey.

I will not trade one more night of you

for weather that was never mine.

I will be the one at the top of the trail,

the one who keeps the radio on,

the one who always knows which way is north,

because north was always you.

When the fog comes for you someday, and it will,

you climb.

And you look up.

And you'll find me there, still looking back.

You were never the thing on the side of my story.

You were the light the whole time.

Love you to the top of every mountain and past the last star,

Mom ♥️