The way I remembered it my father woke me in the night. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said and I was wide awake at once, hearing the excitement in his voice. I was a big girl, could have walked, but he wrapped me in blankets and carried me, holding me close, out to the sidewalk in front of our house.
All week the air had been heavy with unfallen snow. Too cold to snow, the TV weatherman said. When my father and I looked up there was no loft to the sky. We couldn’t see past the street lights, couldn’t see the moon and stars glittering cold in the dark.
The moisture in the air had frozen and formed crystals. When the light from the street lamps came through them the crystals became prisms reflecting tiny rainbows, as far as we could see, the lovely colors spilling into each other, over and over. Neither of us had seen the Northern Lights and we thought that was what we saw. “It’s as if the sky came down,” I said to my father who held me closer, asked me if I was warm enough.
I was. The cold, like the shimmering lights, was just out of reach. I told my father it made me think of Moses, how the Lord had allowed him to look upon the Promised Land but never let him go there. “That’s so sad, sweetheart,” my father said, smiling because I’d said something clever.
He took me back inside when the lights faded in the early dawn. When I woke again he was calling us down for breakfast, confusing me. In sleep, I’d thought I was still safe in his arms.
But it was my mother who took me out in the night, not my father. She’d seen the rainbows when she took the dog out, she told me later, and came up to get us, my younger sister Suzie and me. We were in bed but we hadn’t fallen asleep yet and we put our boots and coats on over our pajamas and went out holding her hands.
Jane Snyder’s stories have appeared in The Writing Disorder, X-Ray Lit, and Manque. She lives in Spokane.