I was looking on the blog of another Friday Fiver and saw the most amazingly beautiful picture of the Northern Lights. It made me remember when I was a kid and my dad was driving us home to Prince Albert from a day of music lessons in Saskatoon. Sometimes at night it would get so dark we could see out across our arm of of the Milky Way, the ocean of miniscule lights. One night, I don’t remember why, he stopped and I remember looking off into the haze of light far past the distinct points of light. I remember wondering what it was, and so of course I could not have known about the dust and the oceans of stars out there. I just thought it was pretty.

But normally we did not see the Northn Lights this way, standing in the cold, staring up. Usually I had to steal glances out the window of the car stealing across the night landscape. It was always on the coldest nights that the sky gave us the most beautiful show, and I always wanted to stop the car and look at the most beautiful thing the sky ever does. But of course we had to get home, and so Inever asked him to stop. I just craned my head and stared through the glass, up into the wild carousing beauty of it. It looked like huge majestic drawings being sketched across the canvas of the sky above us, and erased as quickly as they were drawn. It made me dream wonderful things the nights when we saw it.

Pretty picture stolen from NASA, via Epiphany in c