We didn’t travel to the path of totality although such an ominous name appears to make travel obligatory. We didn’t see the umbra. What a cool word. Feels good in the mouth speaking it. We didn’t see Venus or stars as one friend opined last week.
Muta, the cat, didn’t seem to notice at all.
About an hour before the light was altered by the moon on the east coast, I looked at the directions to make a pinhole camera. As friends from the west coast and midwest were posting pictures on Facebook, I saw a picture of the eclipse through someone’s colander.
I grabbed our colander, my pin hole camera and some canvases and set up our viewing post in the backyard. Neighbors were going into the street to watch with their eclipse glasses.
When Julia got out of The Ride van, I rushed her into the backyard. The sky was already darkening and shadows all over were deepening. The view in the colander was cooler than in the pinhole camera.
We attempted a selfie with the sun in the background.
Julia noticed that the whole eclipse took too long. But we also noticed that the shadows were unusually deep and their darkness was rich. The yellow of our daffodils was like dark-yolked eggs and the light had a feeling of somewhere else, somewhere where filmmakers choose to make period movies.
I admit to being unexcited by the celestial phenomena and never considered traveling anywhere to see it better than I could from my backyard, but its magic and light worked itself on me as we stood in the backyard looking through our colander. In another world, at another time, this would be holy.
Chasing Joy 