The meteor over Medina

Have you ever had a meteor explode in the sky over the city, even the home, where you live?

Just weeks ago, if I asked you that, the answer would have been different.

But for so many of us here in Medina, the answer now is yes.

Before I even get into what happened, I have to admit something. I had a strange, and honestly absurd, thought. Did I somehow bring this into existence?

Because as many of you read a few weeks ago, I shared a story about another meteor encounter I had almost exactly a year ago. At the time, that one felt close. This one was closer.

And I am sure I was not the only one looking out into the backyard, thinking about grabbing a metal detector and seeing if I could find a piece of space.

Like so many of you, around 9 a.m. on March 17, I was going about a completely ordinary morning.

I was standing in my kitchen thinking about what story I wanted to tell this week and how much hazelnut creamer I wanted in my espresso.

Then came the sonic boom (cue Guile from Street Fighter II, if you know, you know).

The windows rattled. Phones lit up. Messages started coming in. Did you hear that? Did you see it?

For a moment, I thought a plane was going down overhead.

What actually happened...

A meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over northern Ohio, moving roughly 45,000 miles per hour. It was about 6 feet wide and weighed around 7 tons. It broke apart high above us, releasing energy equivalent to about 250 tons of TNT.

People heard it across multiple states.

Later, I looked at a projected map of where fragments might have landed. It covered Medina County. Not too far from my backyard.

And through all of this, I kept coming back to something that did not quite sit right.

We have watches that monitor our hearts in real time. Bank alerts that trigger in milliseconds. Satellites mapping galaxies. Phones that recognize our faces. We can see black holes, track oxygen levels and get notified when our food is on the way.

But a meteor moving faster than the speed of sound approached our planet, entered our atmosphere, and we got nothing? No alert? No warning?

Just a boom. Luckily, one that stayed in the sky above.

It made me realize how easily I confuse awareness with control.

Because systems work. Technology works. Most days, things unfold the way I expect them to. And over time, that begins to feel like control.

But it is not.

It never was.

We learned about this in grade school, right? One day, you are a dinosaur walking the earth like you own it. The next day, you're gone.

That is usually where the thought stops. The fragility of it all. How quickly things can fall apart.

But standing there that morning, with the echo of that moment still lingering, I found myself thinking about the fire in the sky a little differently.

Because if something that rare and unexpected can happen out of nowhere, then maybe that truth is not limited to the things that go wrong.

Maybe it also means the improbable can happen for good. That it already has. And that in all the chaos and unknowns, the story may not end the way so many of us fear.

It is strange to think that a fire in the sky, something so sudden and so powerful, left me something behind that was a little quieter.

A pause.

And, unexpectedly, a little bit of hope.