143
NON F ICT ION
The Pleiades For Andrea
By Kerri Goers
We climb the wooden stairs to the edge, lift one leg over and then the other, and lower ourselves into the hot tub. It’s eight o’clock at night. The sky is darker at your ranch, fifteen miles outside of Trinidad. A half-moon hangs low — two on the face of a clock. The stars are more visible here at 6,555 feet, than the 665 feet of Iowa, denser and spread across the sky in long swaths like sugar spilled across a floor. I know little of constellations or planets. Where is the belt of Orion? Those sisters: The Pleiades? Can we see Jupiter in this Colorado night sky? Venus? As children, you and I looked only for the North star, the Big and Little Dipper. The jets in the tub cut out. It is quiet; only the lapping of the water against the side of the tub is audible, slowing to stillness. “We usually go inside after we see a shooting star,” you say.