Remember where you were and what you were doing on 8 April 2024?

[full_metal_ox]

I sure do!

I’m something of an astronomy nerd; you have to understand that the great solar eclipse of 8 April 2024 was something I’d been counting down to my whole life. In my native Dayton, Ohio, I’d gotten to witness the strange begrimed 40-watt sunlight (1) and dappled crescent shadows of the partial solar eclipses of 10 May 1994 and 21 August 2017, after having gotten a fleeting confirmatory glance through SolarShields under welder’s goggles: the exercise was a bit like hunting basilisks or Medusa.

Another point is that I’m acutely homesick for the seasonal markers of the place where I spent 90+% of my life: the violets and wild chives and flowering crabapples, and the two equinoctial yellows of Moraine honeylocusts: neon chartreuse foliage in the spring, and in the fall flaming saffron—turning to orange piles of cornflake crunch beneath the feet. Even the lawn weeds here are unfamiliar.

Until a couple years in advance—by which time it was too late—I had not anticipated that, by the time the total solar eclipse at long last came to Dayton, I would be gone; behold the southern Gulf Coast of Florida’s experience of the Grand Portentuous Celestial Event.

Here in the actual tropics, full fairweather daylight looks nothing like the Mexican Filter(1)(2), being pure and blindingly high-beam bright. In the foreground at left is an ornamental banana plant(3); the hedge to the right of the stepping-stone path is Natal Plum, an African import that’s been ubiquitous in Southwest Florida landscaping since at least the late 1960’s.



You’ll notice a great many fallen large round dry leaves, but absolutely no crescent shadows in the dappled shade of the hedge and the looming palm tree:



Nor here, through the scraggling thirsty stalks of the weeping fig and live oak:



The lawn grasses include nutsedge, recognizable by its crowning spikelets:



By this point, immersion in the sunshine and heat and ambiance of Florida moved me to burst into Disney song.

Not, however, “Colors of the Wind”, “Circle of Life”, or “Under the Sea”. Already visibly reddening in the sun, brined in rolling sweat profuse enough to drip a trail behind me, and increasingly reflecting that documenting Lawn and Garden Flora of Southwest Florida was very much not the Citizen Science I’d longed to be performing on this day, I chose as the motif of the moment an orphaned song from an artifact that never got to happen.

The Emperor’s New Groove is a barrage of zany free-associational slapstick comedy in the Tex Avery vein, with the villainess Yzma performed with bombastic gusto by Eartha Kitt as the Cruella de Vil of Mad Science. The original draft told a much darker story: Yzma was a mortician, necromancer, and High Priestess of Supay, an Inca deity associated with death and the underworld. Lamenting having withered in the aging light of the Sun (with the clear subtext that her lifetime of service to the late Emperor went unappreciated), Yzma declares her intent to take her revenge on the Sun (both the literal celestial body and in the person of the new Emperor) by unleashing the forces of darkness upon the Earth:

Watch on YouTube

The neighbors therefore got to witness the spectacle of a senior female specimen of Homo sapiens var. euroamericana tottering painfully around the grounds photographing weeds on a burner phone while belting out a catchy salsa anthem of resentment. Whether this qualifies as naturalized Florida Woman conduct is an exercise left to the reader.


(1) It looked like nothing so much as that dingy yellow filter Hollywood uses to convey that hey, everybody, we’re in the tropics! fighting terrorists! and/or druglords! and it’s hot enough to pop corn in your parked car!

(2) Hollywood tends to reduce Florida to Miami (Vice) and Orlando (Theme Park Land), and the Local Color Filter is biased accordingly toward ice cream and neon pastels.

(3) Musa spp., most likely ornata. Japanese culture fans may recognize the related Musa basjoo as haiku master Matsuo Bashō’s namesake and botanical mascot; banana leaves’ tendency to fray in the rain and wind is a poetic symbol of fragility and transience: https://www.hermitary.com/articlereviews/shively.html

Tall banana leaves
greenly shade my exile place:
Weeaboo cred, yes?

Comments

[minoanmiss]

This amazing post tells me so much about you and I want to organize my thoughts enough to write paragraphs of reply.

[cmcmck]

I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but I do keep a longhand diary, so........

[zana16]

Fascinated to learn this about The Emperor’s New Groove, which has always seemed a bit like a slapstick fever dream!

[puddleshark]

...the spectacle of a senior female specimen of Homo sapiens var. euroamericana tottering painfully around the grounds photographing weeds on a burner phone while belting out a catchy salsa anthem of resentment...

LOL. I loved this post so much - thank you!

I see what you mean about the light there. Nothing soft about that light.

[melannen]

I was in Dayton! It was an interesting experience: I have family there so I've spent a few weeks a year there my whole life, but it was always summers and Christmas, sometimes a September family picnic. I think this was actually the first time I'd ever had a reason to be there for Spring, and being there to see the height of spring for the first time was almost as exciting as seeing the eclipse! (It really did look like the Mexican Filter, too, but less yellow.)

[full_metal_ox]

Depending on what parts of Dayton you’ve visited, our paths may well have crossed.

(And your mention of summer is a reminder that fireflies are something else I’ve not seen here; in the Dayton area, firefly season would roughly coincide with the period corresponding to the sign of Cancer, peaking circa the Fourth of July.)

[pameladean]

This is fabulous; thank you so much. I was in Minneapolis, and the reduction in the light level was much greater than I'd imagined. The robins sang as the light went down, shut up unhappily, and sang again when the sun came back. The light was frankly apocalyptic and very unsettling.

I did get to see, briefly through clouds and rain, the 2017 eclipse, in Falls City, Nebraska.

P.

[yourlibrarian]

Seasonal markers are something I really enjoy since they're fairly absent in Florida, especially nowadays. There were still some when I was growing up but low temperatures are fairly uncommon from anywhere central on down now.

[yarnandglue]

Haha, this was a fantastic read! I was at work in northern Illinois. We had near complete eclipse but not quite total. It got very dusky - dark enough that the automatic lights on the exterior of the building turned on. Most of my coworkers and the patrons in the building all were out on the patio together. It was a very nice experience :)

[molluscsandmonsters]

*snrk*
That was great.