Familiar

A lot of cloudy night guest pick ups make me laugh. It’s a little bit of the mutual realization that these circumstances are not quite what we know to be ideal.

While everyone trickled out of the B&B tonight, I chatted with a guest at the car about the aurora, under very cloudy skies with some light snow falling. She showed me a photo of the aurora she hoped to imitate tonight. It was probably my smile and gentle laugh that made us both crack up and really laugh together. Another guest was returning after having been to Yellowknife almost exactly 10 years earlier. This was all a warmth within minutes of meeting that you don’t often feel for months or years of a friendship, but the aurora and this environment will do that.

Of course we all could feel and see the snow falling, so we were starting at the very beginning and had a long way to go before we were photographing the aurora straight above us surrounded by a beautiful forest.

From town, I took us a short distance east hopeful to confirm my suspicions that a small break of clear sky was indeed already out of reach before backtracking over to the west where we were likely to be in better shape by late in the night. I was hopeful, but cautiously hopeful, because this wasn’t my first November in Yellowknife after all.

It didn’t come easy, and we ended up driving a little further than I had anticipated, but sightings of stars steadily increased the more kilometres we made, and we did find a home under gorgeous clear sky.

It took the aurora a little time to really join us, but she did.

After a long night of laughter and cosy conversation, the aurora danced all across the sky above us, and the beauty had turned our talkative little group into an almost deafening silence. It was the most beautiful, and just the kind of night I’ll always, always cherish.