We didn’t see any meteors, but it was still pretty magical.
The Perseid meteor shower was last week, and I read that the best time to see it was at 2 a.m., but you could go out and look at the sky at
9 p.m. There really wasn’t a question about which one I’d pick.
I’ve never been interested in astronomy — although I remember one cool trip to the planetarium in Memphis, sitting in the dark as the stars swirled above us, and going to the new planetarium at the University of Central Arkansas has been on my list for a while.
My husband, on the other hand, has an app on his phone that allows you to hold your phone up to the sky, and it will tell you what the constellations are.
I read that we were supposed to let our eyes adjust for 30 minutes and not look at our cellphones before we tried to look for the meteors. My husband put down his iPad, and I put down my cellphone, to go outside. We craned our necks and stared and stared, but we didn’t see any meteors.
I decided to lie on the grass, which is not like me. I had a sweater on, and I spread it on the cushy grass and lay down. My husband lay beside me. I loved the pungent smell of the dirt and grass; I’m not usually that close to the ground.
My husband is proud of his zoysia. “This is some nice grass,” he said.
It was dark, but the full moon was the star of the show, except for a few streetlights and the occasional car that shined its headlights on us. I had just read an article about how our ancestors could look at the sky in the pitch dark because there was no light pollution. But they didn’t know what they were seeing, so they made up stories about gods.
Now we know what we’re looking at, but there’s so much light pollution, it’s hard to see. I also read that the Buffalo National River has been named an International Dark Sky Park.
My husband pointed out the big dipper, and the faint little dipper. We saw airplanes, but no meteors. He talked about when he was growing up, sometimes he’d go outside in his side yard and just look up at the sky ….
We talked about the time many years ago when he and our older son woke up at midnight and climbed into the boys’ fort in our backyard to witness some meteor shower while I slept. They said it was amazing.
One of my favorite memories is many years ago when the boys were in elementary school, and a meteor shower was coming through our atmosphere.
We drove to the edge of town, lay on the ground and watched, seeing a few streaks here and there.
Our older son got back in the van at one point, and my husband said to me, “That’s where I expected you to be.” Our younger son said, “What’s a youtabe?”
We laughed and laughed. It’s a family joke now.
On that night last week, my husband and I lay there talking, and once in a while, a couple would walk by on the street a few feet from us. We wondered if they saw us lying there and if they thought we were crazy.
My husband joked that we could just sleep in the yard and wake up from time to time to look at the sky. As a mosquito buzzed around me and a car came down the street and shined its lights in my eyes, I declined. We lay there for about 30 minutes before we went back inside.
We didn’t see a show, but it was 30 minutes of heaven.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-5671 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.