It’s hard to eclipse the ECLiPSE for news this week. It was a non-event in Europe, where we didn’t have as much as a blink, but as my heart is often in the USA, I paid attention.
The eclipse has always been a major event in my life. I experienced a total solar eclipse with friends, Yo and Del, in Eastern Washington state in 1979. It was a moment of big change in my life: I had just moved to Seattle, and my serious adult life had just started. A couple of months later I met Blair and my life was changed forever. Blair and I experienced our next solar eclipse together in Paris, France in 1994. It was May, and the eclipse could be seen through the arch of the Arc de Triomphe. To view the eclipse, I had built a box camera, the only one on the street, it seemed, and a photographer took my picture for the newspaper. We joined another hundred-some thousand people on the Champs Elysees, and while it wasn’t a total eclipse it was enough to catapult our lives into Europe. Our most recent (partial) eclipse viewing was in 2017, while we were vacationing at Hemlock Lodge in Winsted, Connecticut. It marked the last summer we visited with my Dad. I watched the progress of the eclipse through the shadow of the leaves on the tree near the porch. | 
