Northern Exposure
When I was ten my father died from Parkinson's disease. The following summer I was sent to spend time with my mothers family in Canada. I’m sure my mother needed time to process the death of my father and not have to have me around to interfere with the process.
It was a time of awakening in several ways.
One night when I was staying with Aunt Irene and Uncle Burt and their two sons who were about my age, I awoke in the middle of the night and looked out the window to see these giant green and blue curtains moving in the northern sky. I woke up my cousins and we spent a couple of hours watching the show.
Many years later I accompanied my mom to see her dying brother in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. After the visit we borrowed a car and drove up to Fort McMurry which is several hundred miles north of Edmonton towards the Yukon border to visit some cousins who lived in Anzak, a Cree Indian reservation. I told my cousins wife Doris who is totally Cree that I hoped to see three things while I was up there, a wolf, a moose, and the northern lights.
The lights had not appeared for quite some time,a month or more. So Doris told me if I wanted to she could teach me a dance that would bring them out. I, of course, said “Great.” So Doris taught me the dance and I went out into cold night to dance in the snow.
I danced for about twenty minutes with my breath hanging in the freezing night air. I could see Doris and my mom watching me and laughing at the stupid white American guy dancing out in the snow.
Then there was a flash, barely perceptible in the sky, then another and another. Soon the lights turned to color and began to fill the sky. These lights were way different than the blue and green curtains of my youth. These lights flashed and moved quickly across the sky. When my family inside the warm house looked out again I pointed up at the sky. Doris opened the door and looked out. Soon everyone had donned their parkas and came out to see my lights. Doris hugged me and said, "You are Cree."
It was many years later that I found out that she was right.
So if you wonder how the aurora borealis are caused, it's notthe result of collisions between gaseous particles in the earth's atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere, it's really me or my Cree cousins dancing.