This post is for Linda’s Stream of Conscious Saturday, using a word or words that end with “ound.”

Last Monday, April 8, was the second total solar eclipse that passed over the continental U.S. since 2017. After watching the eclipse from the Chicago Botanic Gardens on a cloudy August day in 2017, I found out that the next total eclipse would be in 2024 and it would pass over the same part of southern Illinois as it did that year. I vowed to reserve well in advance a place for us to stay in 2024 so we could witness the eclipse in its totality.

Well, time passed and I forgot about it until it was too late to reserve. So I had to resign myself to seeing it at 93% totality in the Chicago area, thinking, I’m bound to never be able to see a total eclipse. Anyway, 93% is pretty good!

On the afternoon of April 8, my husband and I went in & out from watching it on TV to witnessing it ourselves using safety glasses from our backyard. I was wearing only a light jacket, as it was in the 60s that day, so I lay down on the ground, or rather, on my patio garden, where I could sit on the edge and lie down on my back to look up at the eclipse. When I did that, I remembered that I was surrounded by fresh mulch that the grounds crew had just that morning spread on the garden and under nearby trees! I didn’t worry about it because of my jacket, which had a hood that I put under my head.

Each time I went back outside and lay down on the garden mulch, I saw the crescent of the sun getting thinner and thinner. I was dumbfounded that the moon, in spite of being 400 times smaller than the sun, could line up between Earth and the sun perfectly and appear to be the same size as the sun. Here I was, earthbound, watching a celestial dance of two round “nearby” bodies, a phenomenon which would not occur in our country again for 20 more years! It was a profound experience! I took a few photos, of crescent-shaped sunlight, filtering through a tree, falling onto the cement of our patio, an image from TV and another image my husband managed to take using a special app which didn’t work too well.