Look up

Credit: Katharine Andrews On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand alongside my dad as we observe the passing of his sister, my aunt. My oldest sister has come from Wisconsin; another cousin, from New York. There are cousins and an uncle and aunt in Denver; my mom and my brother and sister-in-law and nephew and niece in Boulder. Still others will gather on Zoom, to watch the service from a distance, because they can’t make the trip. The night I arrive, I curl up in bed in the guest room at my parents’ house and scroll through news on my phone. I learn that a powerful solar storm is hurling great arcs of ions towards Earth, where they will cascade through the atmosphere in a light show that may be visible as far south…