The NSA probably knew about it first, but I learned that the 2013 Perseid Meteor Showers were imminent because chatter on the Web reached a fever pitch yesterday.  Okay, I said to myself, I need to drag myself out of bed in the dead of night to see them.

Meteors, as we all know, are bits of cosmic dust and debris from outer space that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and appear as streaks of light as they burn up.  The Perseid meteors seem to originate from the constellation Perseus, hence their name.  The shower occurs each year when Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the wake of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

These showers are not rare, but they are certainly worth seeing, so around 2:30 this morning, I stumbled out of bed, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and went to stand at the door to my deck.  I gazed toward the northeast, and amazingly enough, I saw three meteors within the first five minutes.  It was a bit chilly, so I  went back to get a quilt and then brought a chair out onto the deck, but I sat and stared for another fifteen minutes and didn’t see another one.  Then the sky began to cloud over, and I went back to bed.

I’m aware of the superstition that one should make a wish upon a shooting star, but I don’t know when or where it originated, and probably no one else does either, though many have wondered about it.  I should have made three wishes, but I was so awed that I wasn’t thinking of anything but the beauty of the night skies at that moment.  Certainly artists and poets have marveled at shooting stars as well.  In fact, I found this poem by Sara Teasdale in a collection of her poetry that I put together when I was in elementary school:

The Falling Star
I saw a star slide down the sky,
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quck to hold,
Too lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to make wishes on
And then forever to be gone.

I had thought I might photograph the meteor shower, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it with my camera, a point-and-shoot Canon SD850 IS Digital Elph.  If anyone has some advice for me, please leave a comment.  As long as you’re not trying to sell something, your comment won’t be blocked by the blog’s spam filter.  Thanks very much.

My condo at Coachlight in Northampton is sited adjacent to the Barrett Street Marsh, a lovely protected wetland with birds and beavers and other diverse wildlife.  Many years ago when I was living there, I discovered that someone (I don’t know who) had built a boardwalk into the Marsh off the Northampton Bikeway section of the Norwottuck Rail Trail, so that people who wanted to observe the plants and animals could get closer to them.

I had to be in Northampton this morning on business, so when that concluded, I decided to try to find the boardwalk again.  I thought you could reach it from the condo grounds, but when I pushed my way beyond the community garden to the back of the property, I realized that people were probably bushwhacking their way through, because a trail was not obvious, or else it was quite overgrown.

So I retraced my steps to the parking lot of the Stop and Shop on King Street and set out along the Bikeway from there.  Not ten minutes into my walk, I saw a path leading off the asphalt down to the wetland, so I immediately turned onto it.  Yes!  I found it.

I’m looking straight ahead along the boardwalk

The wetland greenery is lush and dense

I didn’t think I’d see a deer in the Marsh

But there it was, staring at me inquisitively

The Barrett Street Marsh has a long history.  If you’d like to read more about it, you can try this link from the City website and search for the word “Barrett.”  I also found another document on the web which dates back a number of years, but it was fascinating; the Barrett Street Marsh is described in Chapter One.