This is just a few seconds.

The rain itself lasted only a few minutes. I love this kind of rain. And it wasn’t raining in the backyard.

I finally got all my Christmas decorations put away. Well, boxed and ready to put on the shelves. I wondered why I took so long, but I think it’s because I knew that Iqbal does not understand the sentimental value of the decorations, and sure enough, I found some that were broken, and more that no longer have their proper boxes, which is what protected them. Sometimes I really need to work hard on letting go of material attachments. But, gee whiz, one broken ornament was given to me by a dear friend about 45 years ago, and another was one my mom gave me. Next year he can neither decorate nor undecorate the tree. I found a box of small, empty boxes last summer. Next Christmas I will see what goes where and use them. (They’re not accessible right now.)

Tomorrow is craft day with my sister, Debie, and sister-in-law, Kris. I’m pretty excited about it. I’m hostess this time. We will be starting samplers. Kris hasn’t done much embroidery and said she’d like to learn more. I know she already knows the basic stitches. I’ve picked several TAST stitches. We’re not following any specific pattern. Debie wants to do a long (vertical) flower sampler. I promised my daughter-in-law that I’d make her a more or less traditional sampler, and typically ADD, I haven’t gotten to it yet, so this is a good chance to start it. Have no idea what Kris will want to do. I have tons of embroidery patterns from DMC and other places around the web, so there are lots of options

After the lights in the sky on Saturday, I got thinking about what I saw before, back in 1968. Those weren’t simply lights in the sky.

I wasn’t able to get the light right. It wasn’t that ray-y. It was more diffuse. It also seemed to shine upward, which I couldn’t figure out how to paint. The thing that struck me at the time and has remained with me was, what I’ve painted as discs, were like highly polished stainless steel. My dad had just made a pair of polished stainless steel steins and these looked the the bottom of them. The light was so bright that we couldn’t see what was above the discs. They were far enough apart that we saw the first one a bit before the next came over the hill. The first one was almost above us when it veered abruptly to the left. The third was just coming over the hill and it and the second also veered just a second or so after the first one.

There were a lot of sightings in our part of New York at that time. Some reports included “little green men,” so my grandparents said not to mention what we saw to anyone because we had heard a lot of derision about the little green men. We didn’t see them, just the bright discs, but there was a negative association with any sightings. I don’t think I told anyone for at least a couple of years. But it’s not something I have ever forgotten. Seeing what appears to be metal flying objects makes a much stronger impression than even not really simple lights.