The ancient Greeks pointed to as many as 88 constellations spread across a night sky, and then they pinned names to them that they took from their religion of stories and myths. They wanted to see order in a night sky, because it seemed chaotic, a jumble, pinpoints of light splashed helter-skelter.

The ancient Greeks gave mythological names to the zodiac’s 12 signs. They include: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius and Pisces.

The ancient Greeks saw a bull in a certain constellation and called it Taurus, their word for a bull. In Sagittarius, they saw an archer, in Aquarius a water bearer, and in Pisces a fish.

Their word “cosmos” meant “order,” because they wanted to believe that the gods who lived on Mount Olympus had set the world in order, in a harmonious mix of stars, earth, moon, and planets.

The one constellation I can identify without much effort is Ursa Major, “the greater or larger Bear,” or the Big Dipper, in the northern sky.

Last time in these pages, I talked about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s fruit trees, and that the wise men, who came from the east to Judea, came bearing expensive gifts, three minerals, and yet today we give three types of foods—fruits, nuts, and sweets—to our children on Christmas Day.

Emerson mentioned the stars in his first book, “Nature.” He wrote,

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.”

Emerson’s strange friend, Henry David Thoreau mentioned a star in the final paragraph of the final chapter of his most well-read book, “Walden.” A series of cryptic words, almost poetry, he wrote.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Founders of the International Dark Sky Places Program came together 20 years ago in 2001, and began to name certain locations across Earth, as Dark Sky Parks, where people can stare up at the stars without much interference from light pollution emanating from a nearby urban area.

Last June, officials certified that Mesa Verde National Park in extreme southwest Colorado was an International Dark Sky Park. The closest cities, Cortez and Durango, are 25 miles and fifty miles away, respectively, from the park.

A month later, in mid-July, I visited Mesa Verde for the first time. My spouse and I stayed at the Far View Lodge, a solitary hotel and restaurant, stuck high on a mesa, at 8,000 feet elevation. I was most anxious to see the stars, but it was overcast and it rained, almost an unheard-of event on that mesa.

Perhaps next time, if I visit that area, I will see the stars. I am now receiving emails from the Far View Lodge, telling me, “Bookings for 2022 are now open!”

When I read Tony Hillerman’s crime novels set in the Four Corners area, his characters will try to describe the awesome spectacle when they look up and see the stars for the first time at that high elevation. “Always present, but inaccessible.” Others would say, almost indescribable.

A travel journalist named Stephanie Vermillion recently mentioned in “Outside” magazine a new program at Mesa Verde. Now that the national park has a Dark Sky Place certification, rangers there, who belong to a Native American tribe, present stargazing programs to curious tourists.

But they point to a constellation and prefer to say its Native American name, not its Greek name. The hunter Orion is known as Wintermaker, “a figure that signals that cold weather is on the horizon.”

Park ranger and Laguna Pueblo member T. J. Atsye, said, “If you look up, you have this whole immense universe. The sky is alive, and the cosmos is another aspect of the park. They hold meaning for contemporary indigenous people, just like they did for our ancestors.”

This week we celebrate Christmas, a time when families gather to give gifts, to eat a Christmas meal, to enjoy time with smiling children and grandchildren, to sing carols, and to remember the Christmas story as the gospel writers told it.

The three wise men from the east saw a single star, and they followed it to their destination in Judea, but, one wonders, “How?” The gospel writers fail to tell us, only that the star guided the three wise men. Their eyes were on that star, but in their hands they each clutched an expensive gift.

Have a very Merry Christmas.

In 1905, the USDA published a bulletin: Nomenclature of the Apple: A Catalog, that listed 17,000 names. After removing the duplicate names, it still listed 14,000 different varieties of the apple.

Between Captain John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the beginning of the 20th century, American settlers planted thousands of fruit trees, and produced thousands of varieties. Horticulturists now consider those three centuries the Golden Age of pomology, the science of fruit-bearing trees.

The most famous of the early planters was John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed. “By the 1830’s, he owned a string of apple-tree nurseries across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.”

Most fruit that we eat comes from trees first cultivated in Europe and Asia, and carried to America.

As for native American fruit trees, they include: the Juneberry, the Red Mulberry, persimmon, may haw, wild cherry, and pawpaw. Also, the few plum and crabapple trees native to America produce a tart fruit, good only for making preserves.

Sixty years before the USDA published its bulletin, a young and enthusiastic pomologist named Andrew Jackson Downing wrote a most interesting book, first published in 1847, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America: The Culture, Propagation, and Management.

An enthusiastic lover of fruit trees, Downing is almost lyrical when he writes: “It is the most perfect union of the useful and the beautiful that the earth knows: trees full of soft foliage; blossoms fresh with spring beauty; and fruit, rich, bloom-dusted, melting, and luscious.”

“I heartily desire that every man should cultivate an orchard, or at least a tree of good fruit.”

Downing points out that each generation of living men and women possess fruit trees because of the countless hours of work that previous generations undertook and completed. For decades, they each tested by trial and error, and then grafted, cultivated, and pruned their fruit trees.

He then declares that there are two tendencies within every fruit tree, “a tendency to improve, but a stronger tendency to return to a natural or wild state.” It is men and women’s duty to fight off a fruit tree’s tendency to return to that wild, more primitive, albeit natural state.

He writes, “If the arts of cultivation were abandoned for only a few years, all the annual varieties in our gardens would disappear and be replaced by a few original wild forms,” and, “In the midst of thorns and sloes, Man the Gardener arises and forces nature to yield to his art.”

Downing connects “culture” back to its original meaning, “a piece of tilled land, or to cultivate,” before it became known as “intellectual training and refinement.” Indeed, the word “culture” has its roots in agriculture and arboriculture, “the grafting and pruning and training,” of human beings.

A current-day biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., said of Downing’s book, that “it is proof that one person can change things. No orchard keeper can be a believer in fate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson—writer, thinker, essayist, and poet extraordinaire—read Downing’s book when first published, and took to heart Downing’s call to plant fruit trees. He first planted grape vines, and then over a hundred trees in the acres beside his house in Concord, Massachusetts.

He planted thirty apple trees, a dozen quince trees, plus plenty of plum, peach, and pear trees.

Richardson says that Emerson’s trees died long ago, and that today most of those acres, “have run wild. Only a few steps from the house the land is densely overgrown, abandoned, and impenetrable.”

That stronger tendency to return to a natural or wild state superseded that weaker tendency to improve. At least that is what happened on Emerson’s soil.

For those who like to catch and digest trivia, Concord grapes were named after Emerson’s town, but not due to Emerson’s efforts, but due to Ephraim Bull’s, the town’s fire chief, who “planted and evaluated 22,000 seedlings before he found his perfect grape,” a well-documented effort on his part.

Certain people find the time to take on substantial tasks that result in profound achievements.

For centuries, at Christmas time, adults have presented to their children— after they have sang carols and acted out the nativity scene in a Christmas program—a Christmas sack, filled with unshelled peanuts, almonds, cashews, and pecans; an apple or an orange; and a candy cane or two and chocolates.

Sweets, nuts, and fruit, the better things that men and women who work with and through nature, can and will create. The three wise men came from the east bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but children today receive that “union of the useful and the beautiful,” fruit from a tree.

The French writer Voltaire, in his fictional novel Candide, tells of a tireless old man who explains to Candide, “I only worry about the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold. I and my children cultivate them; and our labor preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.”

Candide commented, “I know that we must cultivate our garden.” And our orchard too.

Senators and Representatives first met in Congress, under the U.S. Constitution, on March 4, 1789, in the Federal Building in New York City. Six months later, on Sept. 25, James Madison, a Virginia Representative then, submitted to the House 12 amendments to the new Constitution.

His first—called the Congressional Apportionment Amendment—specified that each member of the House shall represent no more than 30,000 people. It fell one state short of adoption, and no state since has ratified it. It appears dead.

Madison’s second—called the Congressional Pay Amendment—stated that “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take affect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

In other words, those who vote themselves a raise must wait until after a subsequent election before anyone in Congress receives a nickel of extra pay.

It is hard to believe, but this Pay Amendment languished for 202 years, 7 months, and 10 days before a sufficient number of states ratified it. How did it revive?

In 1982, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas, in Austin, named Greg Watson, first heard about Madison’s second amendment in a government class. He wrote a term paper for the class and suggested that certain states should ratify it now.

Watson initiated a campaign, and ten years later enough states did ratify it, that it then became a part of the U. S. Constitution on May 5, 1992, and is now known as the 27th Amendment, the last of the amendments to the U. S. Constitution.

On Dec. 15, 1791, a sufficient number of states ratified Madison’s remaining ten proposed amendments—called the Bill of Rights—that they became a part of the Constitution. They guarantee certain freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, petition the government, keep and bear arms, etc.

On Nov. 7, the New York Times posed a question, “What amendments do we need today?”

After all, 30 years have passed since the states ratified the 27th Amendment, and fifty years, since 1971, have passed since 18-year-olds received the right to vote by the 26th Amendment.

Perhaps, Americans do need more Amendments now.

The New York Times staff asked journalists, Constitutional scholars, and professors to respond, and then they printed a number of their more daring, even outrageous, ideas in a supplement to the Times.

A bold headline to the special section shouts, “Snap Out of It, America! Our once restlessly inventive country has settled for sclerotic politics and modest ambitions. It’s time to dream big again. This is a special section featuring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment.”

A law professor in New York suggested that America needs an amendment to extend a member of the House’s term from two years to four years. “A longer, four-year term would facilitate Congress’s ability to once again address major issues that Americans care most about.”

A political columnist at The Week stated, “We’ve had 50 states long enough.” He proposed breaking up the larger states with massive populations, like California, Texas, Florida, and New York, into several additional states. “We need new states. We should start by carving some out of our largest.”

A law professor from Pepperdine suggested a twenty-eighth amendment that would “expand the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to sixteen, that their service would terminate after fifteen years, and that two-thirds of the justices must vote to declare a law unconstitutional.”

A demographer and journalist insisted that all citizens should vote, even babies. He writes,

“The denial of the franchise to children is an injustice that should be corrected. All citizens should be allowed to vote, regardless of their age. The minimum voting age should be zero, with parents and guardians casting the vote for their small children.”

A law professor at Columbia also suggested a 28th Amendment. “All workers shall have the right to form and join labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, to picket, strike, and boycott.” She says that without this amendment, “The consequences are dire. Income inequality has soared.”

One writer, classified as a legal resident, wants an amendment that would give her the right to vote.

“Nearly 15 million people living legally in the U.S. cannot vote. Expanding the franchise in this way would give American democracy new life, restore immigrants’ trust in government and send a powerful message of inclusion to the rest of the world.”

Certain of these ideas will challenge, disturb, or even upset those who favor the status quo.

The staff at the New York Times did not ask me, but if they had, I would suggest the Constitution needs an amendment that would insist upon a viable third or even a fourth political party, separate from the Democrats and Republicans, in each of the Congressional and Presidential elections.

Last time in these pages I began a review of a recent book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City. Its author, Andrea Elliott, focused on a middle school girl named Dasani, who grew up in a series of New York City housing projects, a step away from homelessness.

After Elliott published an expose in the New York Times on Dasani’s plight, the girl was awarded a scholarship to attend Milton Hershey’s middle school, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She arrived at the private school in late January of 2015, as a 14-year-old African-American girl, lonely and scared.

Right away she began to experience success.

With the help of tutors, her grades improved to A’s and B’s. She found a spot on the school’s track team, and also on its cheerleading squad. She was freed of that chronic fear for her personal safety when on the street, and of the obligation to scrounge for food for her six younger siblings.

Instead, Milton Hershey provided her a more nutritious menu—salads, fruits, vegetables, nuts—rather than the chips, sodas, and fast food, that she had eaten at home.

Milton Hershey provided her with better quality clothing—khaki slacks, tennis shoes, polo shirts, sweaters, and blazers—rather than the jeans, t-shirts and flip-flops she had worn at home.

In addition, her houseparents and teachers worked to correct her language, to lay aside her street talk. Instead of saying, “what they feedin’ you?”, they urged her to say, “What are they feeding you?”

Dasani found this change in language disconcerting when she talked on the phone with her siblings back home, who taunted her, “You sound so white now,” and “You talking with some class now.” She did not know if she liked this language barrier that now stood between herself and her siblings.

Milton Hershey’s houseparents set Dasani on a predictable routine: “rise by 5:30 a.m., off to school at 7:30 a.m., dinner at 6:00 p.m., and lights out at 9 p.m.” They taught her to use knife, fork, and spoon, when eating, and not to fear that someone would steal food off her plate.

In addition, they asked her to apologize for her mistakes, to express gratitude when treated well, to steer away from fights, and to know that these actions do not make her appear weak.

The “soft skills” that Milton Hershey’s officials teach—communicating well with others, resolving conflicts, and expressing empathy—are different than the skills the students bring with them.

One official says, “They are primed for anything to go wrong at any moment, making them hyper-vigilant and distrustful of other people. They continually scan the horizon for threats.”

In early April, Dasani returned home for a visit. At once, Elliott writes, Dasani is back to swearing, “sleeping late and scarfing hot chili pepper and lime tortilla chips. It took no time at all. The return to Hershey is never easy.”

Mr. McQuiddy, Dasani’s housefather, greets Dasani, and his other students back to Milton with a plate of lasagna. He says, “Many of them haven’t eaten in the last five days and haven’t slept in the last five days.” Dasani dissolves into tears that night and many more, thinking about her fractured family.

In June 2015, Dasani graduates from Milton Hershey Middle School, but remains in summer school. In August, she enrolls in her ninth grade at Milton Hershey High School.

On October 9, the school’s officials call her away from a movie to explain her family’s bad news. On October 6, a judge authorized the Administration for Children’s Services to remove Dasani’s siblings from their home, citing poor conditions. Her brothers and sisters were now in the custody of the ACS.”

Three months later, on January 9, 2016, Dasani “loses control of her body,” and attacks another girl following a heated argument. Another fight breaks out on March 14. Milton Hershey school officials place her in detention, and try to curb her aggressive responses to disrespect with a behavior plan.

On May 24, Chanel, her mother, whom she has not seen for six months, shows up at the school for a quick visit, and in late November, during her sophomore year, Dasani goes home for Thanksgiving.

Dasani returns, but continues to break school rules, although “she goes on to earn A’s in five classes, including law and business.” She is not lacking intelligence, just unable to control her rage. Her final fight occurs on February 28, 2017, the day the school discharges her.

Back in New York City, Dasani discovers that her family has disintegrated, split apart. Yet, she continues to strive, as she says, to “move forward and change my actions.” In 2019, she receives a high school diploma, “the first child in her family to graduate.”

What does Dasani’s story tell us? That poverty is insidious, that it tears families apart, that family pulls at us wherever we are, that you can take a child out of a family, but that it is more difficult to pull a family out of the child.

Also, that Milton Hershey’s $17 billion endowment cannot stop a teenaged girl from wanting to see and spend time with her mother, brothers, and sisters, no matter their poverty, their homeless condition, their drug and alcohol addictions, or their trouble with the law.

Earlier this month, a New York Times reporter named Andrea Elliott published a book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City.

In the book, Andrea delves into the life of a family: Chanel, the mother; Supreme, her husband; and her seven children. In 2012, the family resided in a single room in the Auburn Family Residence, in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea started her investigative reporting on the city’s poor and destitute by drifting around the Auburn’s front door. In October of 2012, she met Chanel, whose seven children would follow her out the building and down the sidewalk. The family soon let Andrea into their home, via the fire escape.

In dismay, Andrea stared at what these seven kids endured: mice, cockroaches, mold growing up the walls, bed bugs, junk food, and most astonishing, a lack of access to federal resources that could help.

Andrea though was most taken by Dasani, Chanel’s oldest, an 11-year-old girl, whom Chanel named after the bottled water company. Dasani changed baby’s diapers, cooked a breakfast for her siblings, made them sack lunches, and walked them to the bus stop or to school.

She tried to pull the family together, to function as normal as she could, and yet, Andrea Elliott wrote, “The family is a picture of chaos and love.”

An exhausted Dasani admitted to Andrea that she often fell asleep or daydreamed in her classes, or skipped school. She missed 52 days of school her seventh-grade year. She said, “I never did my homework. I was always a D or an F.” When boys called her names, she hit them hard with a fist.

Why was this family so poor, so destitute? First, Andrea Elliott pointed to the drug addiction that extended back generations in this family. Chanel’s mother had a crack cocaine addition. But then Andrea learned that Dasani’s great-grandfather was a World War II veteran.

After the war ended, when he was back in the city, he faced a form of iron-clad racism that kept him “from securing a union job or buying a home. The exclusion of African-Americans from real estate laid the foundations of a lasting poverty that Dasani would inherit.” Without a home, life for anyone is hard.

Andrea spent fourteen months observing the family. Then, in a series of five articles that appeared, with photographs, on the front pages of the New York Times in December 2013, Andrea described Dasani’s life. In an instant, Dasani was a celebrity, known across the city.

Money poured into the newspaper, earmarked to help the children exit their poverty. Someone mentioned to Dasani, that she should apply to the boarding school, the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She did, was accepted, and began to attend classes there late in January 2015.

Milton Hershey, the candy maker, and his wife left the bulk of their massive fortune to a trust that established a boarding school in 1909, that was intended to rescue children from poverty, by providing them an exceptional education, superior health care, and a caring home life.

In 2015, when thirteen-year-old Dasani arrived, there were some 2,000 students, pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. The school boasts of some 9,000 graduates. Officials allowed African-American boys into the school in 1968, and girls in 1976.

The campus covers more than seven thousand acres, in farm country, eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia, and thirty miles north of York and Lancaster.
Officials are proud of their campus. They point to: “203 buildings, six swimming pools, animal barns, a 7,000-seat football stadium, 2,315 student computers, an ice rink,” and a series of group homes, each with houseparents who oversee eight to twelve children.

The student body is about 39% white, 32% African-American, and 18% Latino. Because only low-income families can apply, the average family income is now at $23,574.

The carrot on the stick is that if a student graduates from Milton Hershey School, he or she receive a $95,000 scholarship to attend college. Andrea Elliott though discovered that officials either expel one in ten students for misbehavior, or the student chooses to drop out and return home.

An amazed Dasani stared at what the school was offering her: a selection of clothes and food, tutors to help her succeed in class, free health care, recreational opportunities, and personal safety. Unlike the Auburn, there were no knives and guns outside to terrify her, when she walked out the door.

Andrea Elliott writes, “The school’s staggering endowment—valued at more than $17 billion—provides the amenities of a top university.”

Now enrolled in one of the richest middle schools in the country, Dasani has much to learn. How she will adapt to life at Milton Hershey School, we will reserve for next time in these pages.