My brother and I found a golden record in our grandpa’s field. One of the golden records, the ones that had been sent into deep space on the Voyager probes half a century ago. It was just resting there, a disc-shaped time capsule containing a curated compilation of recorded Earth noise, lodged into the ground as though dropped from a great height. We shielded our eyes and looked into the cloudless blue sky above us trying to figure out where it came from, how it got here, who sent it back and why.

We brushed it off and took turns carrying it with gentle hands back to our grandpa’s house. It was heavy in its metallic case, shining in the sunlight, and when we got back we dug up an old dusty record player and speaker in the basement, in the boxes of our parents’ forgotten stuff. We took it all into our room, set it up as best we could, and pressed play.

We sat on the floor and listened to our planet. Rain and wind and thunder and birds and waterfalls. The people sounds of laughter, crying, singing, greetings in 55 different languages. The music of Mozart and Bach and Chuck Berry. We giggled at the clacking of a train for some reason, beheld a baby’s cry with quiet reverence. When one side finished, we flipped the record over and then laid on our backs on the floor.

We watched the ceiling as the light faded. Our old plastic glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars, retaining so little luminescence now, barely perceptible in the growing darkness. But still there. And the record kept spinning with the crackle of traffic and drumming and footsteps and whale songs, while we contemplated the billions of miles it had traveled to deliver this message back to us. Wondering if we would ever understand what it meant.