I now have eclipse regret. Perhaps I should have gone on a quest for totality. I knew we were going to be at 85% totality, and I thought that would be enough. But now, seeing other people's pictures and reading about their experiences, I'm wondering if I should have made more of an effort. After all, we won't have these opportunities often, at least not in driving distance.
I'm also feeling a tinge of sadness for other reasons. I made this Facebook post yesterday afternoon: "Strange to think about how much has changed since August 2017, the last time I viewed a solar eclipse. Back then, I wrote this conclusion to a blog post: 'Make plans now: August 12, 2045, my house will be on the path of full totality. If the rising seas haven't washed it away, you're all invited to my house. Full totality will be at 1:37 p.m.' That was my Florida house, now someone else's Florida house, and that post was just a few weeks before Hurricane Irma."
We stayed in that house for four more years, many of them years of trying to stay sane in the midst of home repairs from hurricane damage. Sure, we were one of the lucky ones--our insurance paid for the repairs, with minimum struggle to get them to do it. We thought it was going to be a struggle, with a need to send documentation about our contractor and to get said contractor to fill in reports periodically to get the funds released periodically--and then, out of the clear blue sky, the funds were released in one big check.
I spent the next four years expecting the insurance company to come and demand paperwork or demand their money back or somehow make my life more difficult. Happily, they did not.
Thinking about 2017 makes me sad for all sorts of reasons. Even though I didn't have the amount of leave accrued in my new job that would have let me go on a quest for totality, I was happy in that job at that moment. We had just had a successful accreditation visit. Our new president who was in charge of two campuses was still mostly at the Ft. Lauderdale campus, still mostly not concerned with my campus, the Hollywood campus. It was all going to go badly in many different ways in the coming years, but if I had any sense of that fact, it was only a glimmer.
There's also some sadness because we spent that 2017 eclipse in and near the pool in our backyard; my sister and nephew were down for a visit, and we were having a marvelous time. We still have a marvelous time together, but it's different now, in the normal ways that everything changes as we age.
I have spent time trying not to look back, but every so often, I'm stopped in my tracks. Usually, I'm stopped for happiness. If I could go back to 2017 Kristin and tell her how life has changed, she would be amazed: a home in the mountains, almost done with an MDiv program, a part-time preaching position, and a teaching job at a small, liberal arts college. That list represents lots of dreams coming true. It also represents some severances: something we don't always remember when we think about dreams coming true, that dreams coming true mean some dreams fade away.
It is time to get ready for that teaching job--off I go, soon, down the mountains to teach English at Spartanburg Methodist College. I teach, while the bathroom install is happening here. It will be good to be away.
Let me close with another Facebook post from yesterday: "Today I looked at the sky and looked at the ground, hoping for interesting shadows during the eclipse. No interesting shadows, but I did realize for the first time that one of our spindly trees is a dogwood, one of my favorite trees."
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