Molly’s Journals
Big
solar eclipse
What happens when a solar eclipse changes the woods.
Tuesday, May 10, 1994
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A bright blue day gave us an amazing show of the solar eclipse. At 12:15 I was in the shack fixing lunch. Suddenly the light began going dim, even though the sun was brightly shining. I went outside & all the leaf shadows on the ground were crescent shaped. George & I had lunch outside so we could watch the magic. It was like being in a different world. The light was dim, but blue & green, not gold & rose, like at twilight. The three dimensionality was diminished, too. We heard an owl hooting in the distance. Our shadows lost their hard edges & took on a grey edge comprised of thousands of crescents all together on top of each other. George punched a hole in a card & brought out a white-papered notebook to shine the sun’s light onto. We could see the image of the dark moon moving across the sun in the light that shone through the hole. Then we bent our fingers to make tiny spaces for the sun to shine through. The light came through as crescents there, too.
I am so amazed to realize that when we see sunlight, it is an infinite number of images of the sun, that we perceive things to look the way they do because of the shape of the sun.
I saw poplar saplings during the eclipse whose uppermost leaves looked as though they were made of bronze.
Sox joined us for a while outside, then she went in, sat on the table & looked through the window. After that Winstanley joined us & rolled around here & there in the yard.
A yellow rose is blooming on one of our rosebushes.
If
the sun were square would we live in a cubist world?
Sunlight is not like light from a floodlamp.
