Delights & Northern Lights

Here’s a list of fifteen more delights in my little world:

– the rosy glow of dawn

– little dust devils whirling and twirling across an open field, or twisting through the longer grasses on a roadside

– watching storm clouds churning (One of the most fantastic sights ever was a huge super-cell in the sky west of us!)

– seeing much-needed steady rain soaking into a thirsty land

– sundogs and rainbows

– northern lights *

– watching a blizzard (from indoors, where I’m snug and warm )

– a twenty acre field covered with snow geese

– watching hundreds of sandhill cranes foraging in the field across the road

– seeing a flock of swans landing in the slough just NW of our acreage

– fields of canola in bloom, a gold carpet stretching out a mile or more

– the delightful scent of wild roses

– red-to-burgundy autumn leaves on our Amur maple

– the autumn brilliance of a hardwood forest

– poems about all these things

* An amazing sight:
Several months ago I woke at 5 am – like, wide awake. (Must have been a nudge from God. He had something he wanted to show me. 🙂 ) I got up and decided to look out the window right beside my bed, which faces to the north. So I opened the curtains a bit – and saw some amazing northern lights rippling across the sky.

I’d watched for a few minutes when my husband woke up. “What are you seeing out there?”

“Northern lights. Really colourful ones, wavering across the sky.”

So he got up to watch. For awhile they continued streaming, then something incredible started to happen: all across the northern sky, wide puffs of light started shooting up from the earth into the heavens. Like half a dozen airport beacons in different spots, sweeping across the sky, yet each sending their beams straight upward. Here a puff would shoot up and disappear, then more to the west another puff shot up, then maybe in the middle of our view. Rapidly, steadily, the balls of light rose and disappeared into the stars. We watched for about ten minutes as these rising clouds of light continued bursting upwards.

Words can hardly describe the magnificence! I doubt I’ll ever see a phenomenon like that again. If it hadn’t been so early, I’d have sent a text around telling other ladies to get up and see this. Later, texting about it on our church sisters’ chat, I learned that only one other sister in our congregation was up to see it. The others were all disappointed to miss the sight.