Because there was a telescope down in that box. A real one, better than five feet long, wrapped up in oilcloth and strapped to a wooden cradle like somebody was tucking in a child.
I looked closer and saw what the box really was. The top was never meant to stay shut. It had hinges on the uphill side and old sash weights on ropes, so one man could lift it open to the sky. Somebody had built himself a little observatory right into the roof, and then somebody else had shingled over it.
I climbed down and got Nate and Hannah. We brought everything down to the kitchen table. Besides the telescope there were star charts rolled up in a mailing tube and a stack of spiral notebooks held together with a belt.
The notebooks were logs. Every clear Friday night from 1979 to 2003. The date, the weather, what was up in the sky. And under that, a list of names. Children. Tommy R., age 10, saw the rings of Saturn, said wow four times. Kim and Jess, sisters, first look at the moon, Kim cried. Page after page after page.
Hannah found the name on the deed. Leonard Shaw. She called the lady next door, who had lived on that street most of her life. The lady said Mr. Shaw taught chemistry at the high school, and every Friday he let any kid in the neighborhood climb his attic ladder and look through that telescope. No charge. Cookies from his wife. When he got too old for the ladder, his son sealed the roof so it would not leak, and Mr. Shaw moved to his daughter in Ohio. He passed a few years later.
Hannah took pictures of a few of those pages and posted them online, asking if anybody remembered Friday nights at the Shaw house.
Over three hundred people did.
One of them was a woman named Dana, who teaches earth science at the high school in Williamstown now. She drove over the next Saturday, and Hannah handed her the notebooks. It took her about twenty minutes to find it. Dana, age 9, asked me if girls could be astronomers. I told her yes. I believe she will.
She had to go out on the porch for a while after that.
So we changed the plan. I laid the panels out on the front slope and the flat of the garage instead, and left the back slope for Mr. Shaw. We rebuilt the lid, new weights, new rope, new seal, so it opens to the sky and shuts tight against the rain. A fella from the astronomy club in Parkersburg came out and cleaned up the telescope for free.
Now on the first Friday of the month, Dana brings her students. Nate and Hannah keep a new notebook on the table by the attic ladder, and every kid writes their name.
Eighteen years putting panels up to catch the sun. That is the first roof I ever worked on that was built to catch the stars.