April 8, 2024.

It was a kind of gestation period. The expectation. The growing reality of it, as the day approached, until you could feel it kicking inside of you. And when it arrived, it was like life had broken through a shell. It was not anything like what we’d been told, over the centuries –darkness, death, plague. The opposite was true.

Earlier in the gestation period, Art and I thought about going out onto the middle of Lake Champlain to experience the total eclipse. We wanted to be under a vast expanse of open sky, and mountaintops are mostly off limits in mud season. But then I thought it might be too terrifying to be floating in a tippy canoe over water hundreds of feet deep. Cold water, with no one else around, as the last patches of snow and ice still clung to the end of winter. I would not be able to grab hold of Art’s hand when the moment came.

Continue reading in Lambs in Winter: Sketches of a Vermont Life through Seasons of Change (University of Massachusetts Press 2025)

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Referenced: Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse.” In The Best American Essays of the Century, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Houghton 2000. (p. 476-489)

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