I should have known alien phenomena would gore the night when the morning gave me roast-beef-scented breezes.
I don’t know if the two are related. I’m not a scientist. But it seems logically consistent that when savory gusts sweep the autumn chill, some crazy stuff is about to go down.
I went out for a run before the news cycle could hit me. Nothing fancy: couple miles out, couple miles in. Nobody’s dogs were out. My hands and feet get cold, my core doesn’t.
The November air has a bite, like Father Time crunching an apple. I revel in it, and the way it steels my lungs for another year on this earth.
But Tuesday morning, tidings from the equator split the chill. Balmy gusts hugged me.
“Woah now, that’s too friendly,” I chuckled.
I loped home to do the news.
Problem was, the news wasn’t waiting for me.
Sure, it’s easy for feature writers to find news on Veteran’s Day, but for a hard news writer it’s tougher. The government and court were both closed. One of the public officials I called for an interview said he only answered because he thought I was his mechanic.
I powered through the Tuesday lull on Monday’s leftovers: a court victory by Kanye West.
Then I dragged The Husband out to buy groceries.
He was distracted.
“Come on, come on, let’s get home,” he urged.
I wrinkled my nose. “Is sportsball on the TV today?”
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking at his phone, scrolling; endlessly scrolling. I shrugged and bagged up another 5 pounds of granny smith apples, my one true vice.
When I turned to put the bag in the cart, it was speeding away. I had to run to catch up to The Husband and match my rate of speed to his so I could let the apples down into the cart without bruising them.
That’s Einstein’s theory of special relativity, I think.
“We. Don’t. Bruise. Apples,” I chided.
“The northern lights are on,” he answered.
“Which city does that team play for?” I asked.
He thrust his phone under my nose, showing the whole town’s Facebook catalog of iPhone shots of some pink, red, green haze across our horizon.
I shook my head. I wasn’t falling for this again.
The last three times the gosh-dang media told me I’d get to see the northern lights here in central Wyoming, I hiked up my hill, froze my nose, and saw nothing but some white fog wisps.
But then, everyone with an iPhone posted enhanced photographs of the same horizon, depicting blasts of color.
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “The photos always look like that. They fake it. The northern lights are a myth.”
I snatched a loaf of bread off the shelf and marched over to the cereal aisle.
But The Husband would not be deterred. He said he’d seen them before, which I figured was another claim in the vast conspiracy of everyone putting me on, beguiling me into thinking fierce colors hit some invisible force field when the sun has a tantrum.
Still, we rushed home with our groceries. I trudged across the driveway with two gallons of milk.
Then I saw them.
Words fall short.
It’s not the swatches of red, the spears of white, or the green monsters lumbering through them that make this sight awe-ful.
It’s not the patterns and lights, pervading the still dome encasing me.
It’s not y’all with your enhanced photos.
It’s knowing that a whirring, indifferent force came for me, and I was spared. That a burning titan sneezed out plasma at 1 million mph, and the night that covers me turned it into paint swirls.
And however petty are our many interactions on the face of this hard earth (some of which I’m bound to document), something tremendous encases it all.
Mercy is made daunting by the wrath it keeps at bay. And mercy is made beautiful when it clashes with that wrath.
When the blasts fizzled into silver, I put the groceries away. They felt lighter than usual.
And I curled up in my bed that night, a tiny thing nestled safely in a universe at war.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
