Brown and beige haired heads on
Catholic school blue uniforms turned toward me – only one other
redhead in the sixth grade.
I was proud that my work had been
noticed, that I had been seen as worthy of standing up in front of
the class to read what I'd written.
Also, dread.
Two paragraphs in, my nuclear reactor
nervous system started overheating, my face lit emergency red. Too
much high soaring language. I felt I wasn't supposed to write words
like this – it was not fitting in with my peers. And too, I'd been
taught this was “purple patching”. I'd written one typed page,
maybe two? Two would've been worse.
But the teacher, Old Dragon Breath,
made no critical comment when I finished, and no one said anything
mean.
I'd read my class a description of
something strange at my grandparents' farm house, in the northern
third of Minnesota. Their nearest neighbor was a mile away, the
nearest town many more.
While grandparents slept – for farmers late
is after 9pm – I kept company with velour couches and thick
carpeting, and the “brother” electric typewriter lodged under a
small wall light.
(Who else used that maddening machine?
Why did my grandparents have it?)
There was singing. The sound waves
weren't localized, not like a radio. I don't know when I noticed it –
maybe it started out resonant, like Mozart's Requiem in D Minor –
Kyrie – or maybe softly. But like the Requiem, it was a large
chorus of voices, and beautiful singing, male and female.
I looked out the kitchen window, down
the towering row of evergreens edging the quarter mile driveway.
Black trees against gray sky, nothing else. I wondered then, in my
memory now, if it was the sound of the trees, but I can't recall if
there was wind.
I don't know how long it lasted. It
left me shaking with excitement. A little afraid, when it was gone.
* * *
I've told the story many times. I told
it to my daughter, when she asked about whether I had ever seen
fairies. “No, but –”
My daughter recently recounted the
story to my sister, who said she'd been there, too. Parallel games of
Pooh sticks: drop the twigs in the water, run to the other side of
the bridge – “That one's mine!”
On the web I found the theory about the sound of aurora borealis, and I like that. I
don't need to know what it was. Explanation doesn't make it smaller,
or worse, or better.