day 61 - lucky star

Cole calls this illuminated paper star "our family's lucky home star." It hung in the front window of our previous house, and one of the first things I did upon moving into our sweet wonderful new cottage was hang it anew in the biggest window. On this night Cole climbed up onto the windowsill and when I asked what he was doing he said, "Just looking at our star and the moon," and he pointed out the window to the waxing gibbous moon just then climbing above the tree line. My stars have realigned themselves, I do believe -- truly, I feel lucky these days. Lucky to have this house, these boys, this life.

These thoughts, plus the autumnal nip in the air and the realization that we missed the state fair this past weekend, brought to mind a passage from Garrison Keillor's book of essays, "Leaving Home":

“I went up in the Ferris wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or think I did, though it’s hard to remember if it was that year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The Ferris wheel is the same year after year. it’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the Ferris wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in Saint Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings me down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”

I adore this image. I find it beyond lovely, so sweetly, achingly beautiful that it nearly breaks my heart with a sense of joy, of privilege, for having had this moment. Having been there to take this photo.