The way I remembered it my father woke me in the night. \u201cI\u2019ve got something to show you,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All week the air\nhad been heavy with unfallen snow. Too cold to snow, the TV weatherman said.\nWhen my father and I looked up there was no loft to the sky. We couldn\u2019t see\npast the street lights, couldn\u2019t see the moon and stars glittering cold in the\ndark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The moisture in\nthe air had frozen and formed crystals. When the light from the street lamps\ncame through them the crystals became prisms reflecting tiny rainbows, as far\nas we could see, the lovely colors spilling into each other, over and over.\nNeither of us had seen the Northern Lights and we thought that was what we saw.\n\u201cIt\u2019s as if the sky came down,\u201d I said to my father who held me closer, asked\nme if I was warm enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was. The cold,\nlike the shimmering lights, was just out of reach. I told my father it made me\nthink of Moses, how the Lord had allowed him to look upon the Promised Land but\nnever let him go there. \u201cThat\u2019s so sad, sweetheart,\u201d my father said, smiling\nbecause I\u2019d said something clever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He took me back\ninside when the lights faded in the early dawn. When I woke again he was\ncalling us down for breakfast, confusing me. In sleep, I\u2019d thought I was still\nsafe in his arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it was my\nmother who took me out in the night, not my father. She\u2019d seen the rainbows\nwhen she took the dog out, she told me later, and came up to get us, my younger\nsister Suzie and me. We were in bed but we hadn\u2019t fallen asleep yet and we put\nour boots and coats on over our pajamas and went out holding her hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The way I remembered it my father woke me in the night. \u201cI\u2019ve got something to show you,\u201d 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 … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-up","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1885"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1885\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Jane Snyder’s stories have appeared in The Writing Disorder, X-Ray Lit, and Manque. She lives in Spokane. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"