The eclipse trip, and the bread that came with it
I had been planning this one for a year and a half, which is long enough to develop a quiet dread about the weather. We drove up to a ridge above the village in the afternoon, set the tripod on bare ground, and watched a bank of cloud sit politely over the next valley for three hours without moving.
From where we were the Sun was 93% covered at maximum. That is not totality and it is not pretending to be. The sky dimmed the way it does before a storm, the temperature dropped enough that I put a jacket on, and the light turned a flat metallic colour that I have never seen otherwise. But there was no corona, no stars, no sudden silence from the birds. 93% is a strange and beautiful lighting effect. 100% is apparently something else entirely, which everyone who has seen it tells you with an irritating certainty.
Through the filter the crescent got thinner and thinner until it looked like a fingernail clipping, and then it stopped and began to grow back. The projected image on a sheet of white card was sharper than anything on the camera screen, and that is where everyone ended up looking.
We ate a baguette from the bakery in the village, bought at six that morning because the woman behind the counter said the afternoon batch would be gone by eleven and she was not wrong. Crust like glass, open crumb, slightly under-salted in a way I have decided is regional rather than a mistake. I have been trying to reproduce it since I got home and I am not close. The flour is different, the water is different, and I suspect the oven is older than my house.
Next one within reach is 2027. Different continent, longer drive, totality this time.