20 years of farmsteading – in which I have yet to make a profit – has its charms but also its challenges. Two nights ago, I had to corral 20 wayward cows which had grown discontent with their feed and were looking for something more appealing. Somehow, the word “wantonness” comes to mind – or the proverb, “the grass is always greener on the other side.”
Except this was at 4 in the morning while it was still dark. And so I herded them back into their pen, trudging through the deep mud in which I lost one of my shoes (yes, a shoe, didn’t think that I was going need boots) irretrievably in the mud. Now I had to navigate the rest of the task with a shoe on one foot and a sock on the other.
In the midst of this turmoil, I looked up into the starry sky – as if pleading for Divine intervention -and I saw something I had never seen before: a long string of beaded lights slowly drifting as if they were following the path of a now invisible meteor. The lights were the size of the stars and did not dim but simply drifted, not driven by wind (because they maintained their perfect linear formation) or the Earth’s rotation (because they drifted northeast). It was a long string, perhaps several miles long. For geographical context, I live on the western foothills of the northern Rockies in the United States.
Only today when I opened my email and saw the latest vocabulary term from my “Word Genius” updates did I find a word which might describe what I saw: asterism. Look it up. Although associated with stars which seem to form temporary constellations, I still don’t believe these were stars. What I saw was similar to the pictorial representation in the definition, but the string moved faster than the starry background.
Perhaps, they were part of the debris trail which accompanied the two asteroids which passed within Moon orbit earlier last week. Or perhaps, they represented an electro-magnetic phenomenon. I don’t know. Regardless, I expect more “signs in the sky” the closer we get to the nova event discussed on this website.
It is Palm Sunday. God bless you.
JWS
Elon Musk’s Satellite Trains, they will soon fill the skies- 12,000 of them all told…..