riding solo through the eclipse
I didn’t look up and I wasn’t in ‘totality,’ but I knew when the eclipse was happening.
It was about halfway between Denbigh and Hardwood Lake when it started to get noticeably darker around me. At first, I wasn’t sure whether the shadowy light was simply the result of the overcast sky. I didn’t know what time it was because TheFox doesn’t have a device mount on her bars so I couldn’t see my phone – it was in my tank bag.
I knew with certainty that it wasn’t the cloud cover when the road signs started to shine bright like they used to when I drove my car at night. (Vision issues preclude any night driving now.)
It had been almost an hour since I’d seen another vehicle (with the exception of a couple of big rigs); the mid-afternoon gloom started to crowd me and it felt a little spooky. But I didn’t stop. Nor did the relatively sudden semi-darkness last long. I rode on through the eclipse’s eeriness and enjoyed it for what it was: another experience on the road.
I won’t be here when the next solar eclipse occurs in North America twenty years from now. But I’ll keep riding for as many circuits around the sun as I can <3
© 2024 Susan Macaulay. I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
