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I found a little star on the snow. Una Pequeña Estrella.

The scenery was astonishing, the kind you pay money and effort to witness, but I had been looking at the ground for my next step. Being a part of a snaking line ascending to the ridgeline in snowshoes, I didn’t want to be the one who tripped or stepped on the heels of the person in front of me.

But we stopped every so often and each time we did, I glanced at the penguins across the snow field. They were making about the same progress as us. One had just slid down on its belly and that’s why I had been looking away that particular moment; when I brought my eyes back to our now-hardpacked trail, I saw the little star.

One of our group members had lost her delicate silver earring. It had likely slipped off as she adjusted her hat, her balaclava, or glove, or maybe it unhinged as she turned her head to lay eyes on all that was around us.

I found the little star and I didn’t say anything to the group. I reached down, picked it up by my fingertips exposed in half-gloves, and put it in my front thigh pocket. It’s a deep one and I wondered if the little jewel would be forgotten there until it poked me one day on the slopes at home. And then I thought,

Maybe the same as the odds of the moss growing on those chilled, cracked, fragmented rocks. If someone stood in my footprints two hundreds years ago, they might have figured the odds of plants existing in this greyscale environment similarly unlikely.

But now it does. Lichen comes first, with the warmth, and takes hundreds of years of gentle, grain-by-grain erosion for its growth to pry off enough granules from the rock to make soil for moss to lay down its miniscule roots.

Astonishing, I whispered, as I put the star in my pocket and turn my eyes to the soft-snow-covered ridge. I planted one pole in the snow with a swish, then another. One crampon bit the ground underneath, then the next.

My body was as far south as it will likely ever be. In a group of thirteen but also alone, with my two eyes settled on nothing. With my fingers beginning their descent into the loss of feeling.

Up we went to the top, where we looked out over a bay covered in translucent ice. Where a glacier was feeding the thin ice skin on the water with bits of itself. Where the wind cupped its palm around the haggard rock and pushed the snow away into a graceful arc. The kind of smooth sculpting is only possible with the patience of time proceeding at its own pace.

We were up on the ridge, me with a little star in my pocket and the light of a cloudy, icy day in my eyes. Eyes that hadn’t seen the sky-stars in days. Being summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the presence of daylight was no longer dependent on the time of day.

So the only star was in my pocket. Standing up there, I dug it from the folds and crumbs and held it in my gloveless palm.

Pequeña Estrella, little star. You would be given back to your person soon after. But for right then, we looked at what was spread in front of us. At the sky where its compatriots hid. At the water where those compatriots will be reflected one day on the other side of this year.