Night of Northern Lights

Joyce and I had planned to make “Apple Cider Braised Pork Loin” from Cooking Light magazine over the weekend. However, we didn’t pay attention to the overnight-marinate detail and had to postpone the nice dinner to tonight.

After work, Joyce picked me up and decided we’d better run to the mall to return a pair of boots I bought and for her to check some sale deals. Well, she’s not in proper clothes, so we had to go home first. She changed her clothes and fixed Henry a little snack so he would be OK to wait for the later dinner. Just when we about to go, Joyce had to buy calcium pills before all else. So we stopped at a grocery store and get her the life-saving calcium pills.

One-hour shopping at the mall turned out fruitful. I returned the boots but didn’t buy anything. Joyce brought home a beautiful long camel wool coat (reaching to her ankle) discounted to 37.5% of original price.

As soon as we stepped in the house, we immediately started preparing salad, pork loin, and spicy sweet potato wedges.

By the time we had dinner, it’s 9:30 pm. Someone mentioned that we could still see northern lights tonight. We got excited and thought we would go out to try our luck. A late dinner turned out to be great for this occasion. It’s very unusual to see northern lights in this part of the country. And 3 evenings of visibility is just a rare treat. Joyce had seen northern lights videos a local news station shot last night and she’s up to “another” adventure of the night.

Henry could not lift his head to nod to her proposal.

“Com’on! It’ll be fun. Someday we’ll say ‘remember that night we had a special dinner and saw the northern lights?’” Joyce really had her mind made up.

Before we realized it, Henry’s already warming the car up.

It’s 48 degrees out. Not bad. We needed to find a dark place to be able to view the lights. Not knowing where to go, Joyce suggested Mahoney. Well, the park was already closed for the night and we couldn’t linger. Henry drove towards Ashland and told us we could see the sky as we drove past the fields.

“No, that’s not what we had in mind.” I thought.

Right at that moment, the shadow of a roaming creature sprinting into the headlight beams. It was a deer with antler as tall as our SUV’s windshield and 3 feet away from the bumper. Instinctively, Henry swiveled the steering wheel to the left then quickly turned back.

“OH! I thought we were about to roll…” Joyce exclaimed.

I couldn’t tell if we hit the deer or not. Henry said that he “nip its hip” a little. Joyce was upset and thought the deer was probably laying there suffering.

“No! He’s probably had a sort butt.” Henry stated the “fact.”

After that roller-coaster like excitement, Joyce’s attention switched to the road from the sky.

“We’d better get back to the city before we hit another deer,” she said.

Last attempt, we stopped at the shoulder of a country road facing a street light and got out of the car for 5 minutes.

“We might as well have stayed at home,” I thought.