The Scotto Grotto (org)

Start clock – 10:15pm

Random word – scintillate

Hm…

When I think of the word scintillate, I see stars. That’s what twinkling stars in the sky do, because of our atmosphere. When I was younger, I thought distant stars scintillated because they were burning unevenly, like bonfires. I understand now that different thicknesses and movements of our atmosphere causes the effect, and that out in space, they burn with a steady light. That seems sort of less lively. Like Christmas lights that never blink. Still pretty, but so static. I prefer stars that look like little bits of dust, hanging in a sunbeam…turning and varying in brightness from spotlight clarity to nearly invisible.

Sometimes when I look at the sky, I try to spot the satellites… it’s pretty easy to pick out a good five or six in an hour on a dark night. They come and go on pretty even schedules… different trends can help you guess what they’re about. If they’re traveling west to east, (I don’t think I’ve ever seen one traveling east to west… maybe something to do with the way we spin?) it’s probably a civilian satellite, and military surveillance usually go north to south (or south to north).

I haven’t seen fireflies for what seems like ages. They filled my back yard in Boynton on summer nights, flickering and hanging in space in such a weird way, I was usually stunned into watching them for as long as I could. All sorts of colors… mostly a pale greenish-yellow, but I remember some that were a bright blue and vivid green. I think we got so many because of the nearby canal…Perhaps when next summer comes; I’ll spot some in Lauderdale, on the Riverwalk. You could walk through the back yard and be surrounded by them, all blinking at different rates, some flashing rapidly, others just glowing, sitting tight on the leafs of the nearby trees. We didn’t often catch them and put them in jars… if we did, they’d only be kept for an hour or two, and then let go before we had to go to bed. I wanted to find out what they ate, so I could have a living night-light in my room.

End clock – 10:20 pm