On the twelfth of this month, the moon got itself between the earth and the sun, the way it does every so often, and for about two and a half minutes total darkness fell over a narrow stripe of the planet running from Siberia across Greenland, over Iceland, and down into the top corner of Spain. Chatham County was not on that stripe. Chatham County, by my rough count from the porch, got somewhere around a third of the sun blotted out and a sky that went the color of weak tea for maybe twenty minutes, and this has been a subject of vigorous local debate ever since.

My neighbor Wanda contends that what we experienced does not qualify as "an eclipse" in any meaningful sense and should more properly be called "a cloud, except the cloud was the moon." Her husband Ray, who came up on the porch mid-argument holding a pair of cardboard glasses he'd ordered off the internet three weeks prior, insists that a partial eclipse is still an eclipse the same way a partial win is still a loss, which I did not follow, but he seemed confident in it. The Baptist church next door rang its bell at what someone had decided was the moment of maximum coverage, which turned out to be eleven minutes early according to the app on my phone, and nobody has yet apologized for this.

I watched the whole business through a pair of Ray's cardboard glasses, standing in my own front yard, four thousand miles from the nearest point of actual totality, and felt the specific, familiar disappointment of a man who has spent his career reading about important things happening somewhere else. Reykjavík got darkness. Chatham County got a dimmer switch. I have made peace with worse trades.

What nobody argued about, notably, was whether it was worth stepping outside for. Every porch on the street had somebody on it. Ray's cardboard glasses got passed hand to hand down three houses. For twenty minutes, the whole block agreed on something, which around here is rarer than any eclipse, partial or otherwise.