The nights that pass too fast

The aurora was quiet, still gentle, when we arrived out onto our frozen lake for the night, but that quiet wouldn’t be for long.

Clouds were threatening from the west, but this was still far from an immediate concern.

Inside, I was already the happiest. Frozen lakes, ice roads, and the aurora. Everything I so feared losing forever back in April 2022, I had again, and the comfort and homeyness of the ice singing below us all night was something I’m not sure anyone else could ever understand.

I felt reconnected with a love that I discovered and felt grow with every year in Yellowknife. But it was more than just the ice, it was the shorelines, the tree lines, and as close as we have to mountainscapes here, and then the virtual ease with which the aurora just danced above all of that. It’s really the magic of Yellowknife, and this night felt like full circle from that one night in particular back in April of 2022 just before I moved away that produced so much heartbreak.

Returning after 10 years

It was a breathtaking night, really truly breathtaking.

We waited many hours through quiet conditions and cold, but not extremely uncomfortable, temperatures. We were just barely into the -30s, which we’ve been for weeks now, and I’m well adjusted after my yearly fall anxiety about winter winter.

It’s so difficult sometimes to write about nights like this.

There’s a gentle contentment but overwhelming perfection here. It’s in the company of my guests who returned after their first visit 10 years earlier, a quiet location away from everyone else, so much patience and then this beautiful show all around us of colour and movement that you cannot imagine until you are under it.