An Intimate Eclipse
1.
In August, my family traveled to Kansas to be in the path of totality for the eclipse. We decided to watch from a farm on the Platte River. My husband, Nick, and I would be traveling from Connecticut with my parents; our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Thea; and seven-month-old son, Simon, so a reasonable flight and proximity to a major airport seemed logistically important. Of more inarticulable importance, though, is that Kansas City is at the center of our many Venn diagrams making up home. My parents met and married in Kansas City. My cousins grew up in central Kansas. Generations ago, and decades before the families had any reason to know one another, my mom’s people and my dad’s people criss-crossed one another in waves of migration from Appalachia across the plains.
Nick is a high school physics teacher with a Ph.D. in astronomy. At one time, Nick and his graduate school adviser searched the Southern Hemisphere for lensed quasars (mirages where gravity bends light in predictable ways that allow astrophysicists determine the age of the universe). Nine years into his teaching career, Nick’s adviser asked if he would help search for more. After almost two years of work, Nick was second author on a paper presenting their first lensed quasar discoveries, helping, in
