A Once in a Lifetime Moment

Friday night, Bryce and I took off on foot, both half in pajamas, with binoculars around our necks, to get to a spot in our "neighborhood" where there's a lot of sky. 

A field that last year was corn, and this year is some kind of hay grass with milkweed.
Love that they left the milkweed for the butterflies.

We were on the hunt for Nowise, a comet that you supposedly could see, tail and all, with your naked eye but see better with binoculars. It comes only 6,800 years. It was a clear night, which almost never coincides with celestial events in my part of New York. How could we NOT try to see it? 

We'd read somewhere that you look up after sunset, but misinterpreted it to mean RIGHT after sunset. When we got to the road with the fields (about a 10-15 minute walk), all we could see was Jupiter, so we checked online and....oh. An hour and a half after sunset. 

No worries, it was beautiful, as you can see in the picture, and as it got darker the sunset with the trees got even more vibrant. 

A different section of the same field.

The pictures we take in these moments almost never live up to the amazement of the actual sight, so this is the last picture I took. I wanted to soak it up. I didn't want to waste any more time taking shots that ultimately wouldn't do the memory of the moment justice. 

We walked up and down the road to pass the time, Bryce calibrating his starwatching app with Jupiter to make sure we could figure out where the comet was, stars slowly appearing starting with the brightest. 

But the fireflies -- oh man, the fireflies were like constellations in the grasses, in the trees. They were everywhere, and blinked their love messages in Morse Code patterns only they could translate. They were in the wildflowers and the "weeds," in the tall marsh grasses, and all the way up the walnut trees. The bats came out while there was still dusky light and swooped above our heads and over the fields. The tree frogs and bullfrogs sang. Some kind of night bird added to the mix. 

It was insanely gorgeous. 

Once we could see the Big Dipper, Bryce looked to see if it was nearby. And on the app, it was right below it, just above the treeline...but we couldn't' see it yet. It took forever to get truly dark, but we didn't mind because it was just a perfect, perfect night. 

We walked back up towards the field we started by, laughing at the good fortune we have to live in such a beautiful place, and once we recalibrated ourselves (and looked like weird UFO sighters to the very few passing cars), Bryce looked towards the Big Dipper and said, "HOLY SHIT! There it is!" and pointed me in the right direction. 

Sure enough, there was a comet, with a tail behind it, visible in the sky. With the binoculars you could see the tail more clearly, but regardless, you could see a freaking comet in the sky. The last time I saw a comet in the sky was Halley's Comet, when I was a kid in 1986. That one will be back in 2061, and I hope I get another shot at seeing it, but Nowise is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of comet. 

We stood out there watching it for a while, and then walked home, keeping our eyes on the comet as we went until the trees covered it up and the lights in our neighborhood made it hard to see. (The neighbors directly across the street light up their property like goddamn Disneyland, I do not understand why you would move out to the woods and the country and then light the night like that. It actually lights up the entire dead end street next to us, and I don't have to put solar spot lights on my Halloween decorations in the corner garden because their driveway lights do that for me. Ugh.)

At one point on the way home, we walked through a tunnel of fireflies, because they were all in the walnut trees on either side and we were surrounded by flashing lovebugs. 

There wasn't much to the night -- just an appreciation of nature and the universe and the beautiful place that we call home -- but it is probably going to go down as one of our favorite moments together, where we could stop, and enjoy, and appreciate, and sit in a moment of beauty in the midst of all the chaos going on in the world right now.