The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind Read Free

woman turned to face Minka, and her eyes sparkled like stars themselves. “Look up, then, and see what your tenacity brought you.”
    As Minka watched, the woman looked up and blew a cloud of breath with a soft whistling noise. The branches shivered and a mild breeze tickled the hair on the back of Minka’s neck. She looked up and gasped—the clouds coiled and pushed against each other, breaking up so patches of sky showed through. The North Wind’s sister blew again, and the clouds rolled away, revealing stars as far as Minka could see. She peered through the telescope’s eyepiece, and saw the same magnificent stars, illuminated and magnified. And in the center of her telescope’s view, she spied a blip only a bit brighter than the rest, its color a little different, its light a little strange. Minka fumbled with the telescope, focusing on that bright point, squinting to see its form more clearly.
What does it look like up close
, she wondered? Visions of a blazing star flickered through her imagination, its long tail cutting an arc through the sky, and her cheeks ached with her widening smile.
    “That’s it! Oh, I bet that’s it!” She waved one hand at the North Wind’s sister, the other cupped around that blurred light smudge. “Could you bring me some dry paper? And a pencil?”
    One of her father’s notebooks appeared in her line of vision, a pencil tucked into its folds. A pair of fur mittens and her missing hat followed them. The North Wind’s sister saluted her, then sat in the snow and leaned back to look up at the sky. The whole clearing gleamed.
    Minka unfolded the notebook to a blank spread. She stuffed her hands into the mittens, breathless with excitement, bowed her head, and got to work.
     
    The North Wind’s sister accompanied her home, several hours later. Minka lugged her father’s bag through the front door, only to be pulled off her feet by the astronomer and spun around.
    “My girl!” He wept with relief. “My beloved girl!”
    He ushered them into the kitchen and fed them slices of birthday cake. “Never do that again,” he said. “You could have been killed!”
    “But I wasn’t,” Minka said. “I told you, this is what I want to do. And look what I found.” She pushed her sketches and notes across the table and waited while he read them. At last, he looked up at her, eyes wide.
    “This is excellent,” he said. “Truly, it is. I’ll need to watch it a while longer to ensure—”
    “We,” Minka said.
    The astronomer paused, then nodded. “Yes. We. We will need to go out and monitor its progress.”
    Next to her father, the North Wind’s sister winked at Minka.
    They named Minka’s discovery the North Wind comet. She and her father went out every night, charting its trajectory until it passed out of sight, then documenting other phenomena, together. And no one ever again suggested Minka wouldn’t be an astronomer.

Inspirations & Influences
    W hat makes a fairytale?
    I asked myself this question repeatedly as I started what eventually became
The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind
. What classified a story among the likes of “Sleeping Beauty”, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Puss in Boots”? Lots of stories have magic in them, or fairies. Lots of stories have princes and princesses. Many stories start “once upon a time” and end with a “happily ever after.” Almost all stories have a message. But not all of those stories are fairytales.
    Looking for inspiration, I went back to my favorite tale,
The Princess Who Met the North Wind
. As a child, I liked this story for a number of reasons: the princess reminded me of a real person, stubborn and a little spoiled, who didn’t always get along with her well-meaning parents; the North Wind wasn’t pure malice like some fairytale baddies, but more of a mischief-maker. I experienced the same satisfaction about those things as I reread the tale, and then I experienced the same sense of aggravation I also felt as a