Morning Thanks--That evening sun

I had the best of plans. I spent two great weeks at the National Homestead Monument a year ago, and I remember the place fondly. It was going to be in prime position for the eclipse, and I knew there was more than 160 acres to set up a camera, right in the middle of rural Nebraska. 

When I went to the website, I found out I wasn't the only one with grand Homestead ideas. The place was going to be a hub of activity all day long, lectures and demonstrations, every kind of star-gazer, from astronomers to Native traditionalists, a perfect place for me to spend the day, only four hours away and familiar territory.

Then, a speaking gig came up in Milwaukee, prompting a trip home. Hadn't visited my sister for a long time, so we decided to go, and did. It was wonderful. 

The speaking gig was Sunday afternoon, a discussion of the times in the presence of art show, portraits of "Heroes," one of them being Diet Eman, whose World War II story, Things We Couldn't Say, I wrote. The other two spakers were actual heroes from the portraits, a ex-cop from Milwaukee who works with inner city kids and a pony-tailed poet/librarian from Racine, blessed with charm and given to all kinds of social activism. 

The discussion went on and on, gloriously, I might add; but my "best laid plans" were set back when we didn't get on the road from West Allis until sometime around six, which made getting home to Iowa almost impossible and reaching Beatrice, Nebraska, the next morning, Monday, even more impossible. 

We stayed near LaCrosse, and I got up early to try to get some shots of a Mississippi River dawn; but the sky was painfully thick with clouds. By the time we got back on the road, we determined that watching what we could of the great eclipse would have to be in the meekness of our own back yard, where the skies are still ever huge.

By the time we got to Jackson, Minnesota, the sun was being threatened. When we turned south from Worthington, we into an inkwell of a storm, and it rained most of the way back to Alton. Barbara kept watching radar and telling me it was going to clear, going to clear.

Never did. We pulled into the driveway about the time the eclipse was ready to start, but it was difficult to tell if the darkness all around was from an eclipse happening somewhere up above or just the quilt of rain clouds. We lost out. As Trump would say--sad.

The way I figure, the sun, not to be outdone, determined it to do a solo performance when the big day was over. So there's no eclipse in my camera, but a couple of sweet shots of the evening sun on a canvas of bedraggled clouds that's altogether nothing to sneeze at, at all. 

Not an eclipse, but still a blessing, a declaration, a perfectly divine show.