At a small graveyard in Sherman our family perched along a ridgeline, gazing at the mountain where the sun first touches our country each morning. Dirigo, says our state motto, “We lead.” But the eclipse was traveling in reverse from the sun, rising over the Pacific in Mexico and reaching us in Maine at the tail of its arc. Mount Katahdin stood like a stately white-haired elder bearing witness before us, with the staggered gravestones at our back serving as its solemn court. The long line of the mountain’s backbone and its “knife edge” were sacred to me for my own reasons; two young lovers who would later become my husband and me had clambered across that stony dragon-back, returning two decades later to repeat the adventure with our children. Both times my father-in-law was with us. He had hiked it every year for so many years, usually on his own. He gazed across the glacier-chiseled marshland in his leather hat, with hair as white as the mountain’s snowy peak, remembering the paths his feet had followed like a slowly repeated prayer.
The curling husk-tips of last year’s wild grass, dry and long empty of seed heads, prickled our undersides as we found our own places along the ridge and brought out our glasses. The lenses looked too dark to see through, but when we held them up to our eyes, they blocked out all light except for the sun itself. The sun was a dully glowing orb surrounded by blackness, and the moon was part of this darkness as it swallowed a larger and larger bite of the yellow sun-pie. The sky’s blue slowly deepened as the moon advanced. Without glasses, the sun still looked bright and whole, but when we put them back on we could see that only a fingernail sliver was left.
Then the sliver was gone, and our glasses went dark. We removed them from our faces as the earth suddenly chilled and a cold wind crept across the ridgeline. We looked up into an eerie black hole where the sun had been, a wispy white corona flaring around it. I lifted my camera to take pictures, but the camera diminished and simplified the image. Now the sky filled with shadow and a star-bright planet appeared beneath the sun. The mountains, which had been bright white before in a field of light blue, sunk into a dark silhouette with a golden sunset lighting up behind them. “The sun looks like an eye,” people on the ridge exclaimed. But it felt like a heart: the great big burning heart of our existence. A hush of awe fell over the ridge. It was so quiet the earth seemed to hum. The moment felt more sacred than I had expected as the great heart pulsed overhead. The sun was making its power known. If we had not known it from the daily rhythm of day and night we would know it now, in the way even its passing absence darkened our world. I could not see the faces of my family members at a distance. The darkness felt eerie and smoky, not an ordinary nighttime dark. The edges of the earth were still light – not just where the sun would normally set, but in every direction around the horizon.
“It’s coming back, put your glasses back on!” someone warned. We did as they suggested, even though the sun still looked like a wide-open portal. When we did, we could see the tiniest sliver of light appearing where the moon had first started nibbling at the orb. The sky lightened more and more. People began moving and talking again, but much more quietly than they had before. We had been shaken, and no one knew what to say. A little longer and the sky was back to light blue. The mountains reappeared like white molars across the horizon’s broad grin. Sun shone again on the gravestones. Cars choked to life and eased out onto the rural highway, heading home.
We joined our family for dinner before our long drive back home. Mémé made an army-sized quantity of paella to feed her flock of visitors, and the bright color and taste of saffron paid homage to the sun. Children and dogs scampered underfoot. Having just returned from my grandfather's memorial the day before, life was feeling transient and I wondered how many turns around the sun we still had to enjoy the cooking and conversations that took place in this great kitchen. If the world can turn so dark and cold from a passing shadow, blotting out so much of what we can see even with light all around, what other, longer shadows might pass over us? I have known some of them, and each time the sunshine returned I chided myself for having lost a measure of faith that it would. But I will not forget the way the sun felt on this day, hanging before us in the sky, a great presence that continued pulsing with energy even when we could only see the glow of its edges. It still gathered us to it and centered us. That is what I will do then, I thought to myself. When I am next in shadow, I will stop trying to look for a sun I can’t see. I will close my eyes and just feel that it’s there, holding us all as we spin through the dark together.
