Eclipse
Yesterday my daughter stayed home from school. She had a stomach thing and I woke up to a text telling me so. Her dad usually takes her to school on Mondays, allowing me to sleep in and I suppose she didn’t want to give me a heart attack if, I was downstairs minding my own business, thinking I was alone, then STOMP!
I love that at 18 she still calls me mami. I managed thanks to work to score 2 pairs of eclipse glasses. We sat on the porch, eyes to sky, watching, watching. It was her first, my second, though I didn’t remember the first one. Only that we made our own viewers, and were outside standing still, eyes to sky.
Yesterday was so, so warm. My eyes watered every time I looked up. We giggled like kids, knees bumping and then I had to get back to work. More than a dozen seniors sat outside in the parking lot. In dining room chairs, wheelchairs, walkers, glasses on—Eyes to sky.
I enjoyed the joy on the faces of people that I otherwise wouldn’t have expected to be excited about the solar eclipse. Some of us passed around glasses. Darted outside or into the breakroom to steal a peek. Phenomenon.
Looked up the etymology of eclipse, here is the part that stood out to me:
from Latin eclipsis, from Greek ekleipsis "an eclipse; an abandonment," literally "a failing, forsaking," from ekleipein "to forsake a usual place, fail to appear, be eclipsed," from ek "out"
Poetic, isn’t it?