Dear Wigleaf,

I am writing to you from a life and a place I thought gone from me. But in the evening, windows outside wink into tiers of blue and gold, and my window glows there with them.

Did you know a shard of an old life took us to outer space? In Germany, after the Wall fell, after millions of East German books were destroyed to dismantle the past and make way for Western things, a pastor saving those books also saved the key to reach Saturn.

Hidden among the stacks was the recipe for a forgotten ceramic needed in the spectrometer of the Cassini Orbiter, which spent over a decade sailing around Saturn and its moons, collecting data, measuring and analyzing light, observing processes of planet formation and ripples of past impacts in Saturn's rings.

I was living in the former East in 2017, unsure I would ever move back home, when Cassini spun its last orbit and plunged into Saturn's atmosphere, igniting a brief path of brightness before burning away.

By now, I've lived long enough to know that most things gone don't come back. But I also know that having something once still means having it forever. And though you might not believe it, some lost thing will also return one day, like a bottle spit back from the ocean onto shore.

Tell me, do you ever look at the sky and see an ocean? Tell me, will we always feel this at home and at sea on our little blue world? Would you mind if I said I hope so?

Yours,

E