I didn't know about the eclipse until last night when I heard something about on A Prairie Home Companion. Completely by coincidence, a series of events and choices I had made that day had led me to be driving out in the country, with winter coat, hat and gloves, and with a good pair of binoculars in the car.

I was able to watch with such a good view until it got cloudy just at totality. Also there were searchlights coming from somewhere, which made it rather weird until I figured out what they were.

What a thrill. I had seen the 1970 total solar eclipse in Virginia also. I was student teaching in New York, and my father, an aeronautical engineer, picked me up, picked up my mother at home in Philadelphia and we all drove down to Chincoteague and Wallops Island, where NASA was doing experiments.

A few years later we had a partial solar eclipse and someone showed me that if you look on the ground under a tree, all the leaves will make patterns that reflect the state of totality, so that what you would normally see (and never notice) as hundreds of bright dots, becomes hundreds of crescents.

--Linda