The total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, was a special one for me, as I got to spend it with my husband Mark and with my children, Eric (on the left) and Diane (on the right in the photo below, taken by Mark).
My husband and I are fortunate to live in the path of totality for the eclipse. Despite pessimistic weather forecasts, we lucked out and had a beautiful blue sky day, with only a few high thin clouds, and warm-but-not-hot weather.
After a brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and orange juice, the kids spread out old sheets in our backyard as totality approached. They wore eclipse glasses that my parents (their grandparents) had worn for the August 2017 partial eclipse in our state. This photo was taken at fifteen minutes to totality.
Here are a couple photos Diane took on her iPhone of the partial eclipse:
They also spent some time looking at the crescent-shaped shadows the eclipse made among tree leaf shadows. Eric took the next two pictures at roughly the same spot, before and after totality - you can see how the direction of the crescent changes:
My husband has had three eye surgeries and has lost some vision in his right eye, so he chose not to wear eclipse glasses nor look at the sun during totality, instead enjoying the eerie darkness and peaceful quiet of two-plus minutes of totality from our back porch. This was also my favorite part of the whole experience.
After the eclipse, the kids looked at some photos of their Finnish grandmother and her ancestors, that Diane had copied at their first-cousin-once-removed's home a few weeks earlier.
The night before, my kids got a kick out of some old furniture from their childhood that I still have in our house. The kitchen table they grew up with is now my work table in the study. My parents bought it for me for my first apartment for grad school in 1979. They remarked on how small it was. Worked okay for two parents and two little kids 10 and under though.
The desk is the one my first Macintosh sat on in the living room when they were little. (I'm probably going to sell this at an upcoming garage sale - they are both so tall that the desk is difficult to use, especially with a laptop.) The chair is actually originally from Incarnate Word Academy in Houston, one of four my parents gave me to go around the kitchen table in 1979.
Diane was only able to spend a short time in Texas. She flew into Houston on Saturday and rented a car to drive up here. She was able to visit my 93-year-old aunt, her great aunt, Sister Jean Marie Guokas, on both Saturday and on Tuesday before she flew home.
Eric was able to fly to Dallas-Fort Worth on April 3 (to be here for my birthday the next day), and will be flying out of there this Saturday (April 13) on his way to a work convention in Las Vegas. He took this great photograph of downtown Dallas near sunset on his arrival.
