Mono Monday : : Water

I spent, as it turns out, far too much time trying to locate eclipse viewing glasses, partly because there were none to be had...anywhere, but especially because the sky here was covered in clouds and the sun didn't come out until about 5pm. I turned on the television and saw the eclipse happen five times across the path of totality.  The most striking thing about the television coverage was the fact that in all five locations, the commentators were literally struck dumb as the moon completely covered the sun. These are television news commentators who are trained never to have any 'dead air', yet as the sky darkened and the temperature dropped some of them couldn't restrain their gasps while others stopped talking in mid-sentence as they gazed up at the sky.

I sat in Acre coffee and watched a very charming little girl holding up her glasses to look at a totally overcast sky. She didn't seem to be the least bit put out that there was no sun of any kind to be seen, eclipsed or otherwise.

We turned down the opportunity to stay with our friends in Corvallis electing to go last month instead when it wasn't mobbed with eclipse watchers, but I'm rather sorry to have missed a chance to witness an event that clearly made a deep impression on millions of people who had gathered together to watch.

Moving from the sun to water, I could have tried to photograph ice. I could have tried to capture droplets of water falling and splashing into a vessel glass. I could even have tried to catch steam coming out of my Michael Graves teakettle with a little red bird in the spout to make it whistle, but instead I chose a picture of water flowing over a tall basalt rock into a pool in front of our house with a little bird on the top.

Watching it daily from my kitchen, this feature shows the many ways in which water is not only vital to sustain life, but also for some of the other ways in which I rely on it to cool me, to calm me  and to provide a certain degree of serenity and peace in an increasingly anxious world.

I liked the lone goldfinch who flew up and lighted on the edge just a few feet from where I stood. It noticed me, paused for a moment and then decided I wasn't  a threat and proceeded to take a bath.