“Wow, your guest room is really bizarre,”
Said our friends, who had come from afar.
Just a tarp on the grass,
For this lad and this lass,
But they saw every bright falling star.

In the Pacific Northwest in summer, you can throw a sleeping bag on the grass and sleep outside. It’s heavenly during the Perseid meteor shower, when the stars are falling in streaks of yellow and white and blue across the sky … that’s what we did for two nights with our friends, Will and Tina.

An impromptu detour brought us to a ‘road closed’ sign in Elmwood, Illinois. ‘How could they close the whole town?’ I demanded. We ignored the sign, drove into town, and found tragedy and destruction instead of the pretty works of art we expected.