Last night David took Shiloh out for his late-night walk and within a minute of leaving the house he called me. “I just saw a meteor – go look.” And of course, I did. We knew about the Perseid meteor shower which was supposed to be at its height the night before. However, we’d gone out to dinner with friends and then out to listen to live music. It was quite late when we got home so we only gave the sky a cursory glance.
I stood outdoors for several minutes, trying to see as much of the night sky as I could around all our trees. The stars were beautiful but I didn’t see any meteors. Finally I lit the porch candles and went in to get a glass of wine. As I came back outside, David and Shiloh were back from their walk and David was taking a couple of chairs out back. He invited me to come watch the sky from the only really open area we have here. Way out behind the house we settled in with Shiloh and several cats, tipped our heads back and just watched. For the longest time nothing happened. And yet it was mesmerizing.
It was a beautiful night. While we didn’t get any of the rain, storms had come through our part of the state and dropped temperatures into the lower 70s. It was so quiet and peaceful. The gentle breathing of Shiloh, the cats scampering about, cicadas and crickets in the distance. We heard a horse whinny. A few seconds later, a cow mooed. And then a donkey brayed. David and I chuckled and waited to see which other neighborhood animals would join the chorus. There was a dog way off in the distance but fortunately Shiloh never seems to be interested in joining their song.
We sat there for the longest time and were finally rewarded with a few meteor sightings. But even if we hadn’t seen any it would have been worth it. We talked about the stars and planets and our place in this great big universe. David has an app on his iPhone which labels what you are looking at in the night sky. We talked about getting a telescope. Perhaps for Christmas. But what we really want right away are a couple of those zero-gravity chairs like the one at the top of this post.
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