קום צו פֿאָרן, ליבסטער מײַנער, און גענוג שױן אונדז צו טרױמען

We saw the aurora borealis from Robbins Farm. For half an hour on foot, we had followed a kind of elusive greenish haze through the rooftops of Somerville and by the time we got into the car to drive out to the park where I used to set off model rockets in the summers as a child and once watched a lunar eclipse, really expected to see nothing more than a foxfire flicker before the clouds came up from the high-wattage string of the skyline in the south. We saw curtains. We saw plumes. We saw feathers and columns and fields in flux from Cassiopeia to Gemini. None of it looked like a special effect: it looked like the sky, waning and stretching. The dominant color was the spectral uranium-glass green of the photographs, but there were reddish lights and blue tones and all of it visible to the naked eye at 42° 26' 50" N. Every now and then a meteor flashed westward from the Eta Aquarid shower. And we met a puppeteer who asked if we were space people and the conversation went ranging from there while the sky kept glowing. A naked puppet with no eyes asked me never to speak of our interaction the next time we met. I sang some Yiddish. What else? I never expected to see the aurora without traveling for it. spatch has just informed me it is courtesy of a sunspot unrivaled since the nineteenth century. I know there's a hell of a good universe next door, but what a neat one this one sometimes is.