Eclipsed

The magic of totality

I didn’t know how special it would be until the moment it happened. 

I sat in my favorite chair on the deck in my backyard with friends I hadn’t seen in years. We crunched carrots and cucumbers from the veggie platter my husband Seth had prepared. Our friends’ young girls sat with sectioned plastic plates on their laps that separated animal crackers from cantaloupe slices. The round-faced four-year-old with blonde strands wisping from her braid sandwiched a giraffe cookie between two strawberry halves and handed it to her dad. 

For the past hour, we’d been glancing at the sun every few minutes through cardboard glasses I’d ordered on Amazon. Every time we looked up, the moon bit a bigger chunk out of the sun, until the sun itself took the shape of a crescent. Through the dark lenses of our paper glasses, we might as well have been gazing at the night sky. 

Pink Floyd played on my portable speaker. The crescent thinned to a line and then a spot of light. As the music crescendoed and Roger Waters sang “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon,” the midday sky suddenly turned to twilight. It was 3:29pm on Monday, April 8th in northern New Hampshire. We had reached the moment of totality. 

When the world darkened, the eclipse exploded into a ring of light. Our glasses came off. The tentacles of the sun’s corona radiated from the black circle of moon, a bright white Medusa suspended above the roof of my house.

Our mouths gaped. Our voices squealed. The collective cheer of hundreds of spectators downtown erupted from a few blocks away, and we joined in. Our small town was an epicenter of this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

Before my brain registered what was happening, a blinding dot of sun peeked out from the opposite edge of the blackened moon. Daylight returned as if God had flipped a light switch. We perched our paper glasses back on the bridge of our noses as the bright dot turned into the line and then the crescent. Pink Floyd blared, “Everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

It ended too soon—just 43 seconds after it began. Daylight’s sudden return erased the event as if it had never happened. Conversation resumed. Snacking continued. We talked about how amazing it was, the same way we will talk about it on our deathbeds decades from now when we reflect on the unforgettable moments of our lives.

I wanted to reach into the sky and push the moon back over the sun and hold it there so I could have a longer look at the gold tinge of the horizon and the purple hue illuminating the side of my shed. I wanted to bask a moment longer in the collective awe that spread across a 100-mile-wide swath of North America from Mazatlan, Mexico to Port au Basques, Newfoundland. I wanted to keep cheering with my neighbors, townsfolk, and the thousands of visitors who’d driven hundreds of miles through hours of gridlock to witness this celestial moment. I wanted to stare at the black hole sun, the one Soundgarden sang about the summer before I started high school. I wanted to worship its white tentacles like ancient humans did, if they weren’t cowering in a cave anticipating the apocalypse. 

Past the peak of totality, the show was over. We barely paid attention as the crescent widened and turned into the black chomp mark of moon leaving the sun. The album had ended, the veggies were gone, and we carried our empty plastic plates to the kitchen. We nostalgically peeked through the paper glasses an hour later to witness the last lunar speck disappear as the sun returned to its normal shape. We peeled off the sweatshirts we had donned when the sunlight waned, now that we once again sat in the warmth of a cloudless April afternoon, carrying on as if it were any other day on the deck with friends. 

But a part of me stayed suspended in that moment, that 43 seconds of solar night, when the moon’s shadow raced across the continent at 1,500 miles per hour. What are the odds that a total solar eclipse would pass through my backyard in my lifetime, or within a thousand years of it? How did a cloudless 60-degree day insert itself between a late-season snowstorm and a week of rain, the sky staying blue just long enough to enjoy this celestial phenomenon from the comfort of my deck? The miracle of it all moved me as much as the eclipse itself. 

I’d spent weeks feeling anxious about the eclipse—should I stay home, or brave the crowds to get closer to the center of totality? What if I got stuck in traffic? What if the weather was bad and I missed the whole thing? One night I awoke from a nightmare that Seth and I forgot about the eclipse, jumping in our car at the last minute to find a place where we could see it, but arriving too late. Even as the bluebird day dawned and I checked online to confirm that my yard was indeed a mile inside the 100-mile band of totality, I was eager for it to end. The weight of anticipation and fear of missing out crippled me. Would I have time to take photos with my camera and videos with my phone and celebrate with my friends and marvel at the darkness and gaze at the eclipse, all in a fraction of a minute? I woke up that morning wanting it to be over so I could stop worrying.

Now I can’t stop thinking about that glorious moment, wishing it never ended. I long for that liminal space where night and day commingled while friends and strangers communed in the blink of a celestial eye. I want to linger in the convergence of miracles that placed me in the path of something so sacred. I want to remember; to reminisce years from now and say, “I was there.”

So I did what humans have done throughout the ages to commemorate a bucket-list event, like seeing their favorite band in concert, visiting a national park, or running their first 5K:

I bought the t-shirt.

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