Fire Show
Again the family celebrated Clara’s 89th birthday with a prime rib dinner. A dining room was filled with light and conversation. At one end a display of mounted musky, pike and walleye reminded us of our link to the north woods. Looking down upon our long table at the other end, a mounted trophy buck surveyed the dining room. We are all here, by unaccountable good fortune, and the gifts of Nature, eight of us counting Kurt who is present in spirit.
After the celebratory meal, we returned to Dave and Shari’s front yard. The curtain of night was rapidly falling. A fire provided warmth and kept some of the mosquitoes away. As the dome of the sky darkened above us, our eyesight adjusted to the points of light, each an ancient sun. It was a sober thought that every photon reaching our eye began it’s journey before we were born. We were seated in a circle around the fire staring into the bejeweled sky ready for the show of the evening, the Perseid meteor shower.
For several hours we looked upward, star struck. There are no words to express realization that the smear of faint light across one segment of sky was the great wheel of the milky way, our galaxy. We gazed upward, as the dying fire sent fiery spark trails upward.
I believe that everyone saw at least one shooting star flash across our field of vision. I hoped that I would see one because I no longer have the sharp eyes of younger years. Then after some time a streak of light, —-the finger of god adding a finishing stroke of fiery detail to his/her great work.
