Faith To Shadow the Sun
There’s no way to adequately describe a total solar eclipse. Pictures are cool, and thinking about the distances and relative sizes of the bodies involved is amazing, but there is nothing like standing in your own yard and watching it turn weird and eerie around you as the light fades and the mild songbirds start screaming, “What the FUCK???” Then, like a magic trick, the blazing afternoon sun just…disappears. The awe I experienced was so intense my eyes stung and my throat tightened. Most natural phenomena inspire fear—even terror—in at least equal measure to the awe, and I understood why our ancestors responded with such foreboding. What could possibly put out the sun? What could be more powerful? I lay on my back as the sun reemerged, its glowing form appearing like a crescent with its tips pointed up, like horns; a symbol of the Goddess. I watched those horns thicken as the light grew and the heat returned to the day, hoping. I had spent most of the precious minutes of totality lighting candles, pushing back the dark with my hands outstretched, daring to ask. I needed. I wanted the shape of the visible sun to be a sign I had been heard.
That night I washed in some of the eclipse water I had made earlier. The water had cooled enough to steal my breath and leave me shaky and gasping and giggling. I was giddy with the energy of the conjunction and of sharing that experience with people I care about. It was the newest of New Moons. Anything was possible. I went to sleep smiling and relaxed—which is, unfortunately, rather unusual for me. And the next day, Rena came down with a cold, and I discovered that it was probably a reaction to the musty air leaking into her bedroom from the crawlspace behind it. Thousands of dollars replacing the roof and treating the mold in the house, hundreds more treating the mold in us after the years of mold exposure, and here we were again: still having issues. It shouldn’t have been surprising, there is little air flow upstairs because there are no air vents at all, and lots of stuffy crawlspaces (read, old house: high in character, low in functionality). Where the air is stagnant, the humidity turns to condensation; and where there is condensation mold and mildew are not far behind. It only takes 24 hours for wet walls and ceilings, or furniture, to mold. I know more about this than I ever wanted to. It was daunting, trying to figure out a solution to a problem that could only be truly solved by cutting holes in the floors and walls, but we had tackled worse. It should have been only discouraging, not defeating. But, I shattered.
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