Merry glanced up at the TV, which had been on continuously since nine AM. “We’ve got time,” Merry said. “They said the Eclipse starts at 3:04”
“Uh, no. The moon begins to cross the sun at 1:49.” I worried our hosts didn’t grasp the nature of the phenomenon. “You don’t want to miss that. It moves slowly, takes over an hour to get full, when the sun goes completely dark.”
Merry blinked twice, absorbing that concept. She lives with her husband Joe in his mother’s house, moving back to Seymour, Indiana when Nancy, nearly 92, showed signs of more rapid aging. Joe wanted to make sure he’d be there if his mother needed anything, and to lay his claim to the farmhouse at the edge of town. His sister Julie lived next door with one of her daughters and her other, Amy, just a short walk away.
“Well, what time should we be getting Nancy then?” Merry rasped, mixing her laugh with a classic smoker’s cough.
Julie put in, “Where should we take her? Amy’s having an Eclipse party with her friends. She said they’d already started on the beer.”
I said, “Don’t you think it would be cool if Nancy could see it right in front of her own home?” Nancy had been in a nursing home for several months ever since she’d fallen and broken her right arm and left scapula in two separate falls a month apart. We’d come out to the Midwest to see Cheryl’s aunt, our “last remaining elder”, and I didn’t want that visit to be blurred by loud, slurring youngsters, stepping all over an awesome event like this Eclipse. I’d seen one seven years earlier in Oregon with thousands of others camped out on a farmer’s field and knew that, while it seemed like an excuse for a party, it was probably better viewed in relaxation and peace.
I went on. “I checked out the driveway. We could set up there, it’s shady with the trees on the left, and an open view to where the sun will be this afternoon.”
Joe piped up, “Well, let’s go get some chairs, then.” Joe rolled his stout form out the door, leading up to a covered concrete patio at the back of the house. He walked by a webbed folding beach chair and began to untangle some sturdier ones with metal armrests.
“Those are perfect,” I said, noting the rounded back rests, high enough to support our heads as they tilted back during the final climax.
Joe’s hands and arms carry the stiffness and scars of a life lived first as a Marine, then in factory jobs. His fists are permanently balled, the fingers lumpy stubs. Still, he was able to grab one chair in each hand, while I stacked two together. Along with Merry and Cheryl we quickly created a little gallery under the elm tree out front, its distant branches flecked with tiny leaves about to unfurl in the rapidly warming Midwest spring.
“See? Perfect spot here. Just enough shade from the side, clear view to the southwest there.” I pointed towards Highway 31, the occasional semi blasting past, interspersed with cars headed to the airport, where a Louisville TV station had set up its Eclipse headquarters. Seymour had been discovered as the closest viewing locale with sufficient infrastructure for a major event. Motels had doubled their prices, the Chevy dealer offered free hot dogs, and the local tractor store provided seats on its machines to visitors, all seeking to capitalize on the happy accident of geography which put them underneath the curving route of totality.
I checked my watch: 1:47. I put the eclipse glasses on and stared up at the sun the dull orange disc still perfectly round, no defect yet appearing at its margin.
“Where does it start?” I asked. I turned around, and found myself all alone, the chairs haphazardly lined up at the edge between light and shadow along the one-lane drive leading to the two houses in the Wolter compound. I looked back at the sun and noticed a black dot appearing at about 4 o’clock, a little knick which did nothing to quell the rising afternoon heat.
“It’s started!” I yelled. I felt more excited than I had in August of 2017, when the wonder began two days after we’d arrived at a makeshift campground on recently mowed ranch land. Thousands of tents and RVs filled the space, extending down the hill to an Air Force base where NASA had set up telescopes and a research station, with Portland TV showing up, hoping for a clear day. We had the same here, a brief cloudless window in a week of stormy weather.
Six days earlier, we’d touched down in Cincinnati, one day after tornadoes and thunderstorms ravaged the Midwest. The following three days were bitterly cold for early April, in the low 40s at best, with on-and-off drizzle and even some snow at night. My heart was warm, though, as I toured my childhood home, where I’d lived from ages 1 to 17, and the four following summers. Where I grew up and became most of who I am. I’d come back to search for that child’s life, and try and find what made him the man I’ve become.
The tip of the moon reached nearly halfway across the sun’s yellow face, a fiery Pac-Man bent on devouring our comforting satellite.
“That ol’ moon is just eating the sun right up,” Merry chuckled.
I thought of the journeys we’d just made to our pasts, the signposts held in memory slowly disappearing. In Cincinnati, houses still remained yet seemed smaller. Forested gullies had been flattened into strip malls, economic energy devouring the prairies and the woods of our imagination. I looked back up, and said to the sun, “Don’t leave us! We need you! I love your warmth, how it feels on my face, my skin! Without you, we have nothing, nothing here at all.”
I looked over at Nancy, freed for the afternoon from her incarceration in the Covered Bridge nursing home. “Don’t you think it’s remarkable that the best spot for seeing this is right here, in front of your own house, with your children around you?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.” The words came slowly, deliberately. “It’s special. I never would have thought…”
I looked back at the paired orbs above. The moon’s darkness now took over, leaving only a sliver of brightness.
“Look, a crescent sun!” said Merry. Joe chuckled, amused at the transformation taking place.
Cheryl reached over and squeezed my arms. “Thank you for setting this up,” she whispered.
“Well, it was your idea to come out here. You made it happen.”
A small dot remained at 10 o’clock. Then it winked out. The air turned cool, no radiation beaming at us anymore. A breeze picked up, and the sky went to twilight.
Whipping off my glasses, I pulled out my phone, and shot a 360-degree video. The flat horizon surrounding us glowed yellow to pink to purple, a sunset everywhere I looked. I sat down and spent the next two minutes transfixed by absence of light above, the complete and utter blackness of the moon I knew was there but couldn’t see. A shiver passed from my arms through my chest then down my legs, a feeling of awe more than actual cold. My mind a blank, I accepted the wonder, and waited for the light to return.
