We celebrated making it to the moon with a good, long sleep. Some had brought aged whiskey and others had snuck in cigars, but in the end, exhaustion gave way to the relief of rest. The practicalities of finally making it overcame the intention to mark the success of a job well done.
After six months on the rock, we began to contemplate how to really, truly commemorate milestones in this place. Birthdays came and went with a song after dinner in the mess. Someone had a couple of sparkly sticks from Michaels that they’d stashed in their pack for a special occasion and waited to take them out until their own 10th wedding anniversary. That ended up a somber affair because we all missed our partners and special people back home.
By that summer, we all agreed we missed fireworks. There were plenty of stars and stripes to wave around the station, but nothing could replace those gloriously high, bright explosions in the night sky, pocked with the galaxy’s stars in the background. The booms reverberated in your ears for hours after the show in a dull but pleasant way. None of this was possible on the moon: there could be no fireworks without a sky or oxygen or even the sounds of explosion.
The crew watched an old Capitol Fourth show on YouTube, just to try to get in the spirit. But it just ended up another disappointingly unremarkable holiday on the station.
The moon was an achievement for all of us. It was also a dimly lit, grey place, where revelry was what we made of it. So, I started to look around my stolid corner for ways to bring some festivity back into our lives. My predecessor had built my workplace, the station’s greenhouse, and sowed it with basic needs in mind: growing vegetables for eating, biological experiments, and generating oxygen.
It was green and efficient, but it also had the potential to be something more. Command didn’t push back at all when I asked for flower seeds in the next shipment. I reserved a section in the back by the beets for the aster, allium, onion, and roses. I picked them to mimic the colorful fireworks from back home. Explosions in red, purple, blue, and white.
The roses didn’t take, but the rest of that corner plot slowly brightened. Always humid, the air was peppered with the aroma of freshly wet petals. Along with the buzz of the station’s generator, this quiet space almost felt like a mini spa. I moved a folding chair from the lab to a spot nearby so anyone could unwind amongst the blooms.
The flowers peaked in February, Earth time. I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t better scheduled the whole thing to coincide with the next July 4th. All we needed now was a reason to celebrate. At breakfast one morning, someone suggested Valentine’s Day, which generally was sniggered at. Then we remembered that, on Earth, it was the start of the Lunar New Year.
I spent a week researching how to arrange the stems in firework-like shapes. I wove them in wreaths that looked like stars and hung them along the tall windows of the observation deck. The flowers draped across the view of empty space, lit by the red emergency lights lining the ceiling.
It was finally time for a real celebration. Everyone but the essential workers got the evening shift off. The overhead lights dimmed, and I turned up the few solar lights under the blooms, which I’d smuggled in from the greenhouse.
For just a moment, as the lighting came into place, the room was still – as if in a moment of silence. Then the cheers began, someone pulled up a party playlist on Spotify, and pulled out what had to have been a very secret bottle of Hendricks.
We celebrated. And then, we slept.
Kristina Saccone crafts flash fiction and creative nonfiction in the hours between logging off from work and wrangling her young son. Her work has appeared in Dwelling Literary and The Minison Project. You can find her on Twitter at @kristinasaccone or haunting small independent bookstores in the Washington, DC, area.
