It’s exactly 45 steps from the carport to my pottery workshop.

I needed to know that on Oct. 20, 1989, at “straight up” 6 a.m. It was pitch dark and I tip-toed past the dog house lest Rosie would bound out and make me drop the tray of fragile clay pieces I was carrying.

I hesitated to enjoy the bright stars, recalling that, as a child, I pretended that stars were tiny peepholes into heaven. Suddenly I gasped! The whole northern sky was aglow. My first thought was that all of Centralia must be on fire.

No. It was beautiful with greens and pinks and lavender with vertical gray streaks.

I hadn’t seen such a display in decades. “Northern lights,” Mom called them. Several times she woke us to go outdoors and see their beautiful display. She taught us to say, “aurora borealis.”

We saw them in late summer and I assumed that this sky show was associated with hot summer nights. I took the tray of fragile sculpture pieces to the workshop, and glanced at the clock.

Then I hurried up the pond bank for a better view. There was a slow, gentle, rolling movement as many colors smeared across the wide black backdrop.

Should I wake Chub? No, I once ran to the barn where dad was milking and told him we were watching the Northern lights. He said, “Oh?” and kept on milking. This morning I stood there, etching this view into my memory.

Rosie came out of the carport and pawed my leg to get attention. I rubbed her head and, without taking my eyes off the sky, told her that she might never again see an aurora borealis. The vertical streaks seemed to melt into the colorful glow. I was surprised that there was no reflection of this in the calm pond water. Perhaps that relates to the fact that this natural occurrence is caused by electrically charged particles from the sun -- and it’s 60 to 600 miles above the earth.

The display I saw as a child looked more like a stack of flattened rainbows, following the contour of the horizon. I told Mom it looked like a giant strutting turkey gobbler with a beautiful fan of feathers. Mom had said, “Northern lights happen only when everything is just right.” I didn’t know what that meant, but if Mom said it, it was so.

This was not like I remembered, but I imagine that no two aurora displays are alike. Why hadn’t I run for the camera? The colors disappeared quickly and the black curtain turned to gray. The sun wasn’t yet in sight as I went into the workshop at exactly 6:30 a.m.

I called to share this experience with my 10-year-old grandson, Sam Russell. It was get-ready-for-school time so I hurriedly said, “I’ve just seen the most beautiful sight in the sky. Your mother can help you learn to say aurora borealis and it means northern....”

He interrupted me.

“Oh yeah, I know all about aurora borealis. There’s this legend. Aurora was the Roman goddess of dawn who opened the gates of heaven each morning to let the sun god drive across the sky.”

“Oh?” I said, stunned.

“Yea, she didn’t like her lover when he got old so she turned him into a grasshopper.”

Gee, thanks, Sam! Will this Granny never learn that the child is smarter than his predecessors?

That’s almost exactly the way I wrote it, that beautiful morning, Oct. 20, 1989.