In my late forties, I began a journey to learn to write—and somewhere along the way, I became a freelancer. I wrote stories for newspapers and a few magazines, learning as I went, one self-addressed stamped envelope at a time. I began submitting essays to local papers.
“The Meteors of August,” my very first published story, appeared on August 2, 1993, in The Des Moines Register. They paid me fifty dollars for it! I was beginning to understand how writing could connect with readers.
It’s also the very first story in Chapter 1: Celestial of The Immigrant and the Outlaw.
Here’s how it begins:
The star-strewn Milky Way hung across August night during my childhood on an Iowa farm, and a curtain of other stars stretched all the way to the horizon–the amphitheater for my favorite meteor show.
The Perseids.
I keep watch for the return of the Perseids the second week of every August. Catching the flash of a meteor still sparks anticipation and awe in me, even though I know that these mysteries of the heavens are just spaceborn grains of rock or metal. As they are swept up in the earth’s orbit around the sun, they burn up in our atmosphere, beckoning silently as they dart across the darkness.
As a child, charmed by these falling or shooting stars, as we called them, I did not realize that the Perseids have been a favorite of other night sky watchers throughout the decades. Generations of my ancestors probably saw them and pondered the marvels of the universe.
Any night of the year, meteors can be seen on a dark night–up to half a dozen in an hour. But several predictable times during the year, we can see meteor showers, even dozens of them in an hour, when the earth looms near the orbit of a comet or asteroid.
This silent summer show is named for Perseus, the constellation where the “radiant,” or streaks, seem to begin, and the performance is due to debris of a comet’s path. The earth’s orbit takes us nearest the path of the comet, Swift-Tuttle, the second week of August.
Comet Swift-Tuttle is the largest object (16 miles wide) to regularly swish near the Earth on its oblong path around the sun. It passed by us in 1992, and will swing by next in 2126. But we orbit right through the comet’s debris every August.
The maximum activity for the Perseid Meteor Shower will be this week, on August 12 or 13. Warm weather make this the easiest one to watch from the Northern Hemisphere.
Those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, when is your best meteor shower?
This is the first story in The Immigrant and the Outlaw: A Collection of Stories from America’s Heartland.
