Later this month, I will be looking at the spectacular sky, searching for meteorites—flying stars. It will be cold if I dare to step outside and the lights will rush by any message they have for us on earth, hard to read because of the speed of their path from outer space to our atmosphere.
Often when I look up, I admit I wonder if there is other life trying to communicate with us and If I have somehow missed the message. Such wondering takes me back to summer nights in childhood when I watched for blinking lights that were within my reach. These lights moved in groups. They glided not across the far sky, but low, in the atmosphere, at my ten-year old waist height. They came out from the safety afforded by places behind the hedges to other, more open parts of the yard. Were they foraging? Just out for an evening flight? I was never sure, but I did love to watch them glide in groups, slowly across the open spaces of our yard.
These sentient lightships glided silently across our lawn, blinking what seemed like a series of semaphore messages sent with tiny lanterns. I liked to tip-toe behind their convoys, marveling at their quiet maneuvers, wondering what messages these little “ships” were blinking to one another and wondering if there were any way I could decipher their code.
On one especially warm evening, that year when I was ten, my mother, tired of watching me chase these tiny fellows around the yard, wanting to encourage my interest in “science” handed me, a cleaned-out glass mayonnaise jar, tin lid punctured, “so they can breathe.” Then, she demonstrated how, trailing the blinking armada, one could easily scoop stragglers into the jar, securing their sequester with the metal lid.
This seemed like a good idea to me, because I was sure if I had a jar full of these magical communicators, I could parse the purpose, the meaning in their off and on signals.
An apt pupil, I soon filled the jar with many tiny living lights. Mama was impressed. She then suggested, “Let’s take the jar next door to show Grandma.”
Showing off my skill as a trapper of wild beasts, albeit small ones, appealed. I grasped the jar tightly, holding it in front of me, as we slowly walked down the sidewalk to Grandma’s. All was well until I pulled the jar closer to my body and looked closely at its sides. Tiny dark legs were crawling up the glass toward the lid’s small open holes. I fancied I could feel those feet though the glass, tiptoeing on my fingers. I screamed, pulled both hands away, leaving the jar suspended in the air for less than a second before it plummeted to the cement below.
My jar crashed onto the cement before my mother could rescue it. I jumped back to avoid the flying shards. Glass bits were soon spread over the sidewalk. The creatures once held captive inside the jar took a few tentative steps around or over the glass, onto the sidewalk, and then lost no time flying off. I did not chase after the escapees.
I know science is exploring the possibility that some stars are really blinking messages at us in what we call twinkling. Maybe. But although I am not sure if they will ever find the Rosetta Stone of those alien signals, if I did discover the meaning of the blinking of the small lights that used to glide across my own backyard. While they were climbing up the jar they were likely blinking, “Let us go, set us free.” And once the jar had shatter as they flew away, I could almost hear the words blinked out in their little lights, calls of celebration: “We’re free, we’re free!.”