Totality in Ohio

How I learned to love the eclipse

Photo taken by the author at approximately 3pm on April 8, 2024

I unfold my lawn chair in a park somewhere in the middle of Ohio, and plop down. I take a sip from my bottled water and…I wait. When I arrived, only three or four other people were here, but as the minutes turned into an hour, more people meandered in and set up their spot from where they, too, were going to stare at the sun. Some, like me, just sit and wait, occasionally putting on our special eclipse glasses and lifting our heads from our phones just long enough to quickly look sky-ward for a few seconds to monitor the progress of the moon’s journey. We were all waiting for the same thing, though: totality. That brief event during a total solar eclipse when the moon, due to its distance from Earth and its size relative to the sun, completely covers the sun, when darkness occurs in broad daylight, and bizarrely a 360 degree sunset will encircles you.

I keep my expectations low about how exciting or awe-inspiring the totality of the eclipse will be when it finally arrives. But I am like that with most things in life. Keep expectations low and you won’t be disappointed, is my motto.

This is the first total solar eclipse to cross Ohio since 1806, when the state was but a mere toddler at 3 years old. At the time Thomas Jefferson was president, and it was a time when our two current presidential candidates were but mere toddlers…