The plants are attracting the wrong crowd.

After working a bit very early this morning, I drove to the flattest open space that was convenient. Sleeping less sometimes has its rewards. I parked near the railroad tracks and access road by Meeks and sat on the hood of my car. It didn’t take long for the meteor showers that peak this weekend night to dazzle me. Though there was more light interference than I liked, the wide view of the night sky provided more than enough vantage for me to watch several brilliant transitory flashes burn across the sky. I’m sure anyone driving by might have looked twice at that hour because I decided to lay flat on the road several feet away from my car, and my eyes turned to the sky. As I lay there, the mass of traffic snarls from yesterday evening seemed like a week ago. The hardness of the ground didn’t bother me. After a few more flashes, I went back to my apartment. The first time I went back out on the landing, I wasn’t thinking about more meteors. But the sky gifted me with a couple as I stood there.

These meteorites are debris related to Haley’s Comet. It staggers me that about 50 tons of this debris hit the Earth’s atmosphere daily.

Though my Grandpa knew nothing about the night sky, some of the sporadic memories I have of him are of him pointing at the Big Dipper, or asking me if I could see the man in the moon. He spent most of his life surrounded by fields and immense night sky views. I spent more than a few seconds thinking about what the meteorites might look like in the fields of Monroe County.

For a brief few moments, the night made me wonder how objects that could be 4.5 billion years old were racing toward their demise only for me, a solitary human being, to witness. And that each of us, in our own way, flies through time exactly like they are.

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