A Little Family

by Kathryn Rantala

One day a little family began. It did not start out intending to be small but formed in the usual way and then, because it was attractive, gathered others to it. As the nucleus was not large or forceful, however, it did not retain them very well. Spouses, friends and small children flew out from time to time as from a giant crack-the-whip, their faces lit with surprise and momentary thrill.

Charted over time, the energy of this group remained a constant. Truth be told, the family was not unhappy this way. It prized itself as itself.

And little wonder. Its members captured attention like an approach of weather. Among and between them were musicians, surgeons, artists and aviators; charismatics; wealthy, quixotic, generous, explosive romantics; scholars, hermits, woodworkers, contemplatives, seers, effetes. Each flared in one or more or all of its interesting ways, amazing others, entertaining themselves. An aurora borealis of a family.

Within an aurora, streamers or arches of light appear, caused by the emission of light from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along magnetic lines. Similarly, families emit excitement, each according to its lights.

One day, out of the blue, forces of containment, perhaps in the stratosphere, where weather changes but little, began to take aim at this little family on earth and pick off its members, one by one. The casual observer might not note the steadily lessening of size and influence of this already tiny group, but within it, absences were mounting like holes in the ozone and were very noticeable indeed. And alarming.

The current hole in the ozone is now a little bigger than Antarctica.

The same observer would see the course of this family as smooth. It aged in all its levels, it got on. In close-up, its progress was as rutted as washboards, as strained as cleats. Nevertheless, in trouble or at peace, it sensed its distinctions, valued its similarities and held together, in potato cellars and lecture circuits. An armada of a family, running seaward and generally clear of the rocks.

Armadas are made up of warships or fishing vessels or other moving gatherings of things we see. Such as a belt of meteorites. Or of other things we do not see very well. From space our atmosphere appears as a thin blue veil sailing around the world.

The rate of meteor activity in the atmosphere is greatest near dawn when the earth's orbital motion is in the direction of the dawn terminator. Earth scoops up meteoroids on the dawn side of the planet and outruns them on the dusk side, reminiscent of the behaviors of a following tide or youngest child.

There is evidence in early rock formations of an anaerobic reducing atmosphere containing elements in their reduced states.

The polar winter, for example, leads to the formation in the stratosphere of a vortex drawing air from the upper layers of atmosphere and lower mesosphere. Stratospheric clouds comprise the home of lesser gods who, when sunlight returns to the polar regions of the hemispheres, are again able to see details of the earth faintly through holes in the ozone, the vacancies caused by chlorine and bromine compounds in catalytic destruction cycles. The gods are mildly distracted by what they see on earth and enhance their lazy joys by gaming. The object of one such game is to reach for what they can almost see below and remove the greatest number of them. Isolates and small groups, especially if they shine, are targets of convenience. These removals are called Chapman Reactions, after S. Chapman, in A Theory of Upper-Atmosphere Ozone, Mem. Roy. Meteorol. Soc., 1930. The reactions include a sensation in mortals not unlike the sudden onset of winter.

Such a sensation may be like a veil, of which there are many kinds: lengths of protective or ornamental netting for the head or face; any of various liturgical cloths, esp. to cover a chalice; material which hides, obscures, disguises or softens tonal distortion; interventions through which it is difficult to see; sheer things; membranes or other covering body parts; things to be lifted or assumed by a nun.

Of all the veils, the thin blue one, in particular, is the most exquisite and magical.