LOOK KIDS AN AURORA

Events like a solar eclipse are very nostalgic to me. 
Not for the phenomenon itself, but for the ritual around it.

My father was drawn to the sky. When I was a child, that meant being pulled out of the house at odd hours; summoned to witness a bright star, a rare alignment, something he deemed worth interrupting whatever we were doing. It didn’t matter if we were in the middle of an episode of Dallas. If he called, we came.
He ran a body paint shop out of our garage. Late nights were spent there, radio on, working, stepping outside now and then for a cigarette. Looking up. Checking the stars. One night, I was around ten, my sister five. He burst into the living room: “Come quick. There’s an aurora.” That alone was enough. In our part of Sweden, in the early 1990's, it was almost unheard of. We followed him out into the dark, across the yard and into the field behind the garage, the grass high around our legs. Above us, the sky was moving. Our first norrsken. Dad said something about how it moved like music, then—BAAM.
I had walked straight into a piece of rusted tractor equipment. No warning. Just impact, shock, then blood. I couldn’t see the wound, only feel it running down my leg. I screamed. Whatever we were looking at was gone.
I still carry the scar. Large, uneven. It probably needed stitches, but my mother had a strict threshold for hospitals—high enough that this didn’t qualify. And besides, Dallas was still on.

Photograph "Doris and Bengt, 2001" 
By Jenny Brandt, Hasselblad, E6