Astronomic love.

I’m not sure why I decided to tuck in my brothers the other night.  I never do – at the ages of nine and twelve, they are hardly dependent on being tucked in (much less by their big sister!).  But it struck me on a whim, so I went into their room as they were crawling under their sheets. This is the conversation that followed…

                I walked in and went to my younger brother’s bed first.    

                “Goodnight Eli,” I said, sitting on the edge of his bed.  “Sleep well tonight.” I leaned over and gave him a kiss on the forehead. Thank goodness, Eli is a dear and he’s not old enough to be grossed out by this behavior. In fact, he hung his arms around my neck and planted a kiss on my  cheek in return. 

                “I love you to the moon!” I said.

                “I love you to the end of the Milky Way!” he said with a cheeky grin – when you’re a nine year old boy everything is a competition, even saying “I love you.” (Actually, the syndrome of life-as-a-competition does not stop for boys when they’re eight.  In fact, it might not stop for them before they die…)

                “No wait,” he said, turning to his older brother.  “What’s that thing called?  That thing at the end of the milky way?”

                Matt is my older brother of the two.  At twelve his hobby is astronomy – and he takes his hobbies very seriously. (He may very well be smarter at twelve than I am at eighteen.) 

“That thing at the end of the milky way?” asked Matthew.  “Oh, you mean Andromeda.”

“Yeah!  That thing!” said Eli.   “I love you to Andromeda.”

Tickled at his adorableness, I smiled and ruffled his curly mop of hair.  Then I went over to Matthew’s bed and gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek.  He smiled tentatively with his dimples in a way that said, I’m a little old for that, but I might still like it.

In answer to his smile, I said “I love you to the moon, Matthew.”

And in his typical straight-forward way, he said, “I love you to M13.”

“M13?” I asked, puzzled. “What is M13?”

“It’s a galaxy.”

“Oh,” I said, still a bit confused.  “That’s cool.  Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said.  Then his dimpled smile stole across his face and he said, “But it’s farther than the end of the Milky Way.”

Somehow, to say that I only love these boys to the end of the milky way (an unimaginable distance), or to the incredible M13 (an even farther distance), to say that I only love them that much... would be a vast understatement.  

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