The Sieve of Eratosthenes as an Aid to the Memorization of Prime Numbers

Just as memorizing sight words can help a kid read better and more confidently, there are tons of math facts that, if memorized, will make a kid's calculation work quicker and more confident. 

Our culture is well used to having kids memorize the multiplication tables through at least 10 (through 12 is better!), and certain formulas like the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean theorem, but it's so helpful to just know, when you're busy doing your algebra, say, if a number is a perfect square or a Pythagorean triple, etc. It builds confidence when a student is learning advanced math concepts, and it increases their speed and fluency, which they will VERY much appreciate whether they're working through a page-long proof or an SAT problem set!

When my kids were pretty little, we dedicated the first ten minutes of the first car trip of the day to memory work, and they memorized a lot of advanced concepts by rote then (most famously, the first 25 digits of Pi, a party trick that they still both often pull out over a decade later, lol!), but it's a better aid to learning and to memorization to have them, whenever possible, create for themselves the anchor chart that contains the information I want them to memorize.

So when I realized recently that my teenager has lost most of the prime numbers to 100, I pulled back out the same activity that she used to create her Prime number chart back when the kids memorized the primes to 100 the first time around back in 2016.

It's the Sieve of Eratosthenes!

Creating the Sieve of Eratosthenes is simple. All you need are a hundred chart and some colored pencils or crayons. This hundred chart has the numbers by rows, and this hundred chart has the numbers by columns. This hundred chart is blank, for some sneaky real-world handwriting practice writing the numbers to 100. 

To create the sieve, you simply start with the first Prime number, 2. Don't color it, but color all of its multiples. Bonus points if you unlock the pattern and color it that way! The next uncolored number is your next Prime number, 3, so leave it blank but color all its multiples. It makes a pretty pattern, too!

Carry on through 7, and by the time you've colored the last multiple of 7, you'll have colored every composite number through 100, and every uncolored number is a Prime. Your grid will look like this:

photo credit: Wikipedia

I think the patterns that it makes are beautiful and fascinating!

While you're working, it's best if you have a Ginger Gentleman supervise you:

While you're working, you also might notice that you have a sudden, inexplicable swarm of Asian lady beetles inside your home. Would the Ginger Gentleman like to meet one?

He very much would!

Please note: no Asian lady beetles were harmed in *that* particular encounter. When Matt got home and found the swarm and went for the vacuum cleaner, though, well...

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a quick, enjoyable, non-rigorous enrichment activity for an older kid, best used for a review of Prime numbers or to construct a memory aid/anchor chart. However, you can actually also do this activity with quite young kids, since multiplication is the only skill required. It's fun and hands-on, the patterns are pleasing, and it gives kids a really interesting math concept to explore.

Here are some good books to use with younger kids in partnership with this activity:

To extend the fun, younger kids can play Prime Number Slapjack or color in a Prime path maze. If kids are a bit older and are ready to properly learn about Primes, composites, factor trees, and the factorization of Primes, this lesson and this lesson are excellent jumping-off points. 

We have a lot of wall space in our home, and my kids have always enjoyed making large-format posters, maps, and charts to put on our walls. A large-format hundred chart mounted on a wall lets kids have a different experience coloring it in mural-style, and would also allow room for kids to write each composite number's factors into those squares. Alternately, extend the hundred chart to 1,000 and keep sieving, although I wouldn't blame you for eventually pulling out the calculator!

Here are some books that older kids and adults would enjoy; completing a reading assignment (and perhaps even a response essay!) builds context and adds rigor to an otherwise simple activity, and is a good way to facilitate different ages/abilities working on the same project:

Here are some other math facts that a student could aid fluency by memorizing:

• fraction/decimal conversions
• PEMDAS
• Quadratic formula
• squares
• square roots (perfect square factors and simplified square roots to 100)
• Pi to several digits
• Pythagorean theorem
• Pythagorean triples
• triangle identities
• SOH CAH TOA

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Hands-On Fibonacci Sequence Explorations: Combining Logic, Math, and Art

I've realized that much of the hands-on math enrichment that I offer the kids is "number sense"--helping to develop their intrinsic understanding of numbers, their flexibility with them, their pattern recognition of number relationships. Whether it's fractions or geometry or exponents that we're studying, I always see space in their curriculum where free exploration can make kids wiser in what they're studying.

In algebra right now, the older kid is studying proportions and ratios, so what better time to spend some more time on the Golden Ratio?

I introduced the kids to the basic concept of the Fibonacci Sequence and how it's calculated, then asked them to use each number in the sequence as one side of a square. They were to draw those squares on 1cm graph paper, color them in, and cut them out. I told them that they should stop only when the next square would not fit onto a single piece of graph paper, although if we did this project again, I'd tape together larger sheets of graph paper ahead of time so that they could extend the sequence further.

Here's one of the sets that the kids came up with:

Apologies for the poor lighting in these photos, but school gets done on rainy days as well as sunny!

You can make lots of pretty patterns with just these squares. And yes, I DO think that Fibonacci Sequence stacking blocks would be AWESOME!

Next, I told the kids that these squares of the Fibonacci Sequence are also a puzzle, and I challenged them to use all of their squares to make a rectangle. They're familiar with this idea from the pentominoes that we've played with.

Here is the older kid's rectangle:

And here is the younger kid's!

The kids did not confer, so I think it's interesting that both built their rectangles the same way, and neither happened upon the "spiral." In fact, when I later rearranged the pieces to show the spiral, the younger kid still didn't really see it. This is where more and larger squares would have helped by extending the pattern.

I took away the larger squares, and had the kids solve the puzzle to make a rectangle with only the three smallest:

Then I added the next piece, and again asked them to solve the puzzle:

Do this again and again, and you see how the pattern can be formed:

Beautiful, isn't it?

In related news, we were at the US Space and Rocket Center last week for the older kid's Space Camp graduation (more on that another time!!!), and in their museum, look at the display that we found!

It was particularly terrific because it extended the pattern for us to see!

 I didn't look at any additional resources with the kids until after they'd worked the "puzzle," because I didn't want them to see a solution, but later in the day we watched these two YouTube videos from two of my favorite YouTube channels:

Here are some other great Fibonacci resources that we've been exploring:

• Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci
• Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature
• The Rabbit Problem

And here are some more ways to explore the Fibonacci Sequence in logic, math, and art:

• Fibonacci circle art. This project is to circles what my project is to squares. 
• Here's how to draw the spiral from the squares.
• Here's how to see the spiral in nature. We struggled with this for a while, and Syd is still somewhat of a nonbeliever. 

This project gave inspired me to come up with some more extension ideas just for me. I think it would be really cool to design a large-format squares of the Fibonacci Sequence, print it, and glue it to foam board the way that Matt and I did with the decanomial square. Imagine how many more interesting patterns you could come up with. I also deeply need to sew a Fibonacci sequence quilt.

As if I don't already have enough dream projects on my to-do list!

Homeschool Math: Exploring Pentominoes with Middle Schoolers

Shape puzzles are super fun and excellent for mathematical and logical thinking. I've been trying to strew more puzzles for the kids this spring, along with the sensory materials that I'm already used to offering them, and out of everything that I've offered, I think that shape puzzles have been the most popular.

And, of course, it doesn't hurt when *I* become obsessed with what I've strewn!

I happened upon pentominoes in the book Engage the Brain: Math Games, Grades 6-8. It was the first time I've seen them, and I can't get enough of them! They're diabolically simple: five squares must all share at least one side. Twelve original shapes can be made from that rule.

You can simply fiddle with them, putting them together however you like and seeing what you can make, or you can solve puzzles with them, either trying to assemble them into rectangles or squares or fit outlines that others have made. There are some easy, perfect-for-beginners puzzles out there, but we started with these more difficult ones, specifically the 6x10 rectangle with 2,339 reported solutions.

"Over two thousand solutions!" you say. "Why, that must be simple!"

I'm afraid I must disagree:

The kids and I worked and worked and worked on this! The most frustrating thing is almost solving it but for one single piece. Grr!



The younger kid developed the strategy of drawing her possible solutions rather then putting them together. Took much longer to do, but it did look lovely!

Don't tell the children, but I cheated. We were all working together at the school table, and they were so focused and intent that I didn't want to disturb them by leaving, myself, without a solution. If you homeschool, you likely know that the surest way for a child to lose interest in her work is for you to lose interest first. Go take a five-minute phone call and you'll find that the school table has mysteriously absented itself of children when you return!

I figured that the only way that I could walk away from the table without discouraging the kids is if I'd solved the puzzle, but that darn 6x10 rectangle just would not solve itself! And so I cheated. The puzzle page that I linked to earlier has its solutions diagrammed, so I began sneaking peeks at the solution, giving myself more and more pieces that were correctly placed to start with. I think I'd cheated half the puzzle before I finally managed to solve it:

And then, about ten minutes later and completely on her own, so did my thirteen-year-old.

Grr, indeed!

You can make a simple set of pentominoes using just graph paper (I'd recommend the one-inch grids), but you'll notice that we have these handy-dandy, ready-made plastic pieces:



Super-awesome pro tip: they come from our Blockus games! We own both regular Blockus and travel Blockus--AND an almost complete extra set of travel Blockus pieces--all bought from Goodwill. Blockus and Scrabble are two games that I almost always buy when I see them selling for a song at a thrift store or garage sale. I had it in my head that I really wanted to make DIY versions of pentominoes, so the younger kid and I experimented with some unfinished one-centimeter cubes that I have, and we did manage to end up with a couple of sets that I like okay:

I like that these handmade pentominoes are more tactile than a paper model, and that they're three-dimensional, so they have more utility and scope for creativity than the 2D versions. However, they're impossible to make so that they fit together as snugly as store-bought, machined pieces, and that U piece, in particular, I had to remake about four times, and after painting it I realized that I'll have to remake the purple one a fifth time--it's REALLY difficult to keep that middle space open more than a centimeter!

So in this case, I've finally resigned myself to the fact that store-bought plastic is simply better:

I had additionally been thinking that I should make a DIY magnetic version, perhaps to fit in some sort of metal tin, maybe made of Perler beads and with magnets on the backs, but then I realized: duh. I can obviously just use our TRAVEL BLOCKUS set. So that's one more problem solved!

The greatest thing about pentominoes, especially if you have gifted learners and learners at different levels, as I have both of, is how many enrichment opportunities there are with such a simple toy. There are a million ways to play with pentominoes, a million ways to structure activities, a million research projects, a million projects to solve, a million ways to incorporate them creatively into play. Here are some extension ideas and resources, some of which we've used, and some of which I've put on our to-do list for later exploration:

• Chasing Vermeer. We're listening to this right now as our car audiobook. 
• online pentominoes game. The younger kid enjoyed playing through this online game.
• lesson plan. If you need to more formally introduce the concept pentominoes, here's a full lesson plan.
• pentomino alphabet. These solutions are demonically tricky, but I think it would be really cool to cheat the solutions, then use them as templates and simply draw them and decorate them on graph paper for fun.
• printable pentomino puzzles. These didn't work great for us, because the printout diagrams didn't match the sizes of the pentominoes we already have. If you needed a quiet activity that kids could do independently, though, you could print these and the included pentomino templates. Bonus points for printing the pentominoes on magnet paper, popping it all into a metal tin, and having the travel pentomino set of my dreams!
• 3D pentomino puzzles. Here are some templates especially for pentomino sets made from blocks.

See! Now you can be obsessed with pentominoes, too!

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Sun and the Solar Eclipse Study: The Phases of the Moon

Here's what I've showed you of our Sun and the Solar Eclipse study so far:

• Solar Power
• A Field Trip to the Total Solar Eclipse!

If you're using the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide as a spine (and you should, even if there's not an eclipse near you--it makes an EXCELLENT spine for a study of the Solar System!), then this is Lesson 10: Waxing and Waning. Here is where you learn about the moon's orbit, the visible phases of the moon, and you preview how eclipses work, although you'll cover this in more detail in a future lesson.

The NASA Eclipse Activity Guide has a big build for the phases of the moon demo--foamboard, TWENTY balls and TWENTY skewers, etc.--but I'm going to tell you what you actually need:

1. lamp
2. human
3. ball that's around baseball/tennis ball-sized, painted half-black and half-white

The younger kid painted a glass Christmas ornament from my holiday crafting stash half black and half white, and when we were done with this demo I put it back in the stash. We can still paint it something cute for Christmas.

To demonstrate the phases of the moon, first set up your lamp near a wall, then put the kid several feet in front of it. You don't want it to blind her, and you want to help her remember that the distances are very vast here. Just make sure that it's warm and bright enough on her face that she can't lose track of it. The lamp is her sun.

She is the Earth.

You hold the moon, and you ALWAYS hold it so that the white side faces the wall with the lamp (don't think about facing the lamp exactly, or you'll end up tilting the moon's orbit and the demo won't work as well). You're going to orbit the kid, always with the white side of the moon facing that wall. As with the distance between the kid and the lamp, don't feel like you have to orbit the kid too closely--the closer the moon gets to her, in fact, the less she'll see the phases cleanly. Stand back a bit as you orbit.

You also need to remember that the moon's orbit is about 5 degrees off center, so the moon isn't going to go directly between the kid's face and the lamp--that would cause a solar eclipse, and we're not going to have one of those right now, except maybe to bring it up at the end.

The kid should stand still, but should turn in place so that she's always facing the moon. I like to start with the full moon. Hold the moon where it should be, make sure the kid has rotated so she's looking straight at it, and ask her what she can see--it should be the white circle of the full moon. Have her verbalize where her perspective is on earth looking at the moon, and where the sun is in relation to the earth and the moon. 

Walk the moon to a waxing quarter moon, make sure the kid is rotating with you, and have her observe the moon's phase, her perspective on the earth, and the sun in relation to the earth and the moon. Repeat this for every quarter until you're back at the beginning. 

There is no way to make moon phases any clearer.

I like the kids to hear the same information in different ways, the better to contextualize it and strengthen all those neural pathways, so we also watched two moon videos from one of my favorite YouTube channels, CrashCourse--

--and this simpler video on moon phases from BrainPOP:

For a craft/snack, the younger kid then made us a model of the phases of the moon out of Oreos, and it was delicious!

I had intended to add a one-month nightly moon observation to this, and it would have been amazing, but we just didn't keep up with it. An activity for another day, then!

Here are some more lunar activities that I'm saving for another day:

• giant printable moon (we actually did this a couple of years ago--I put it on the wall and invited the kids to doodle on it with Sharpies!)
• templates to make paper dice with the moon phases printed on
• phases of the moon flip book
• phases of the moon embroidery
• phases of the moon bunting

And here are some more of the reading resources that we used as daily assigned reading, family read-alouds, activity intros, or just to sit invitingly on our home shelves and tempt someone into exploring them:

• If You Decide to Go to the Moon: This picture book that walks you through a scientifically accurate voyage to the Moon in the second person. It's a good book to read before dramatic play or creative writing.
• Moonstruck: Poems about Our Moon: Choose one of the poems to spend time memorizing together over the course of a couple of weeks. You can also use it for reading and handwriting practice. Memory work is SO good for our brains!
• Seasons of the Moon: Folk Names and Lore of the Full Moon: Add some Social Studies to your science unit by reading moon lore of other cultures. 
• Moon: A Peek-Through Picture Book: Die-cut pages are such a clever way to illustrate the Moon's phases!
• Apollo 11 Moon Landing: An Interactive Space Exploration Adventure: This Choose Your Own Adventure-style book also incorporates history and science. 
• Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography: Use this book to introduce a guided or creative art project. 

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Sun and the Solar Eclipse Study: Solar Power

For the month before the solar eclipse, the kids and I completed an intensive science unit on the sun and the solar eclipse, and it was awesome! Even though I LOVED astronomy as a kid, I'd been having trouble interesting the kids in the study (they are very much attached to the life sciences...), but this event turned out to be the perfect incentive to interest them, and they picked up a lot more than we'd started out intending to.

We used the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide as a spine--I used their main science activity and instructor's information for each lesson, but I added readings from library books, videos from YouTube, and arts and crafts activities for the little kid. I had to buy a few special supplies, such as our first spectroscope and a digital outdoor thermometer, but most of the required materials were readily available.

We completed most of the units in the order suggested by the Eclipse Activity Guide, or at least we intended to... the sun has its own agenda, so it was actually a Saturday when we did some of this particular unit on Solar Power; it had been overcast for most of the week, so when the sun rose bright and shining that day, I was not going to waste its power!

The kids and I read and discussed part of this non-fiction children's book on solar power, then watched this TED-Ed video that shows how solar panels work, and Bill Nye's simpler explanation of the same subject. We've never lived in a house that got enough sun to be worth putting solar panels on it, so I'm always impressed to see solar panels in action. And after watching the TED-Ed video, I now actually understand how they work!

The activity that goes with this lesson in the NASA Eclipse Activity Guide is making and using a solar oven. The kids actually did this for a couple of days, re-engineering their first efforts when they didn't get great results with their first solar ovens. The basic model that the activity guide instructs them to build is a not incredibly efficient compilation of pizza box, aluminum foil, and plastic wrap:





These didn't really heat up the quesadillas and s'mores well, so the next day the kids reworked them with some stash mirrors (managing to break fully half of them, so I guess that's some more junk out of my storage space!). The second versions worked a little better, but if I had this unit to do again, I'd take the time to pull up some hardcore solar oven plans, get out the woodworking tools, and make a "real" solar oven with the kids, one that we could use over and over again to ACTUALLY cook our food...

Oh, well. I'm sure the subject will come up again some other time!

To make this study more suitable for the older kid, I added selections from Khan Academy to her requirements, wherever they applied. For this solar power unit, she also completed the Energy lab, which covers solar power and other energy sources, with an emphasis on sustainability.

To make the study more suitable for the younger kid, I added hands-on activities to her requirements, although they were tempting enough that the older kid often joined in. And when we made sun prints for this unit, the whole family joined in!





We are absolutely going to put building blocks on sun print paper again for math one day--I can't believe that I didn't get a good photo of the finished print, but the dark print where the bottom of the block sat, plus the lighter print made from its shadow, formed a beautiful and realistic-looking cube on the sun print paper. It was astonishing.

If we'd completed this study over a longer period of time, it would have been interesting to try to arrange a field trip to a solar park, or a lecture from a member of one of our local non-profits that try to encourage people to use solar power. We could have made a more elaborate solar oven, and experimented with sun printing onto fabric. The kids could have measured our house's energy expenditure, and done some problem-solving to reduce our usage. I could have bought them some solar panel kits and let them make themselves some solar-powered toys and gizmos.

But for our brief look, we now know about solar power, solar panels, and some uses for solar energy. And now I know how a solar panel works!

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Total Eclipse of the Sun

Are you guys still getting over the total eclipse, too? Is it just me?

Y'all, I had been so pent up with excitement over the eclipse that by Sunday afternoon, I'm surprised that my partner didn't just drug me like a dog about to go on a plane trip. Studying the eclipse intensely with the kids for a month just got me even more worked up--I've been revved up about this eclipse for a year. My partner got us our hotel room 50 minutes from Carbondale, Illinois, Eclipse Capital, almost a year ago. Heck, I have had our eclipse glasses since MARCH!

Plan A was to leave our house on Sunday, stay the night at our hotel 50 minutes from Carbondale, then drive the next morning to Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve, just outside Carbondale's city limits, and watch the eclipse there. Plan B, if Crab Orchard was too busy or the traffic on the highway into Carbondale was too heavy, was to head a little further away and watch the eclipse from Cedar Lake, a reservoir more to the east. Plans C and D, if Carbondale was overcast, were to drive either towards Nashville or St. Joseph, Missouri, until we were free of cloud cover, and then find a suitable spot to watch.

To that end, we left the house on Sunday morning, just in case the traffic was already heavy. Since it wasn't, though, we ended up with plenty of time to spend the afternoon in Evansville, Indiana. We played at a local playground, found a Krispy Kreme so that the little kid can continue to live her dreams of eating ALL THE DOUGHNUTS, and then tag-teamed the kids around Angel Mounds, on account of I'm not used to planning vacations that include dogs and I didn't notice that dogs weren't allowed in the archaeological area until after we'd paid our admission:

Three Sisters Garden, with the addition of sunflowers

Here's a partial reconstruction of the wattle and daub stockade that surrounded the community.

This is what the inside of the stockade would have looked like, absent kids trying to look up the Native American's skirt.

This is Mound A, the Central Mound. The chief probably lived on the highest point, with some other community members living on the lower platform.

Even the lower platform is high, especially considering that it was built using basket-fulls of dirt, probably carried by hand.

Here's what the village might have looked like:





I'm always the most fascinated by the artifacts that are uncovered in a particular place. The architecture or other physical features are one thing, but these are items that regular people used as part of their everyday lives.



And look! The perfect complement to the weeks that the little kid and I spent studying prehistoric fashion as part of her History of Fashion study!

See the holes drilled into those teeth? It's like the holes that we drilled into shells!

We had an early night at our hotel (why does my quest to order from independent pizza places wherever we stay mostly result in us eating a lot of highly mediocre pizza?), with me checking the radar hourly and fretting over all the traffic reports, and an even earlier morning. The good news is we passed the north-south biscuit and gravy line in our travels, so there was a crock pot of sausage gravy waiting for me, along with cold biscuits, microwaveable cheese "omelets," and bad coffee down in the hotel's breakfast buffet. Every single other person on the planet was also shoving breakfast into their faces and bolting out the door, too--we'd booked our hotel so early that it was a normal price, but the night before, on our way down to the pool, I'd heard the check-in clerk telling some guys that they were full, but she'd heard there were still a couple of rooms at the Fairfield Inn down the road that were going for 900 bucks apiece.

We were on the road by 6:30 am for a 50-minute drive, with little traffic to speak of, and were pulling into an only quarter-filled parking lot at the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve an hour later. There was an air-conditioned visitor center across the lot, with working bathrooms and flushing toilets, and a lovely wooded hike that led to a lovely lake, but honestly, we spent most of the morning like this--



--and like this--

--yep, hanging out in the shade right off of the parking lot. The dog was content, we had plenty of books, and the car was right there whenever we wanted a snack or a drink--it was perfect! The parking lot filled within the hour, and then we were also treated to the sight of cars coming in and circling hopelessly before driving on--ahh, the satisfaction of sitting snugly in our spots in the face of the desperation of others!

Around mid-morning, rangers even came out and closed off the entrance to our lot entirely, so we could move our lawn chairs out of the shade and onto the asphalt, to better watch the show:



Even before you could really tell a difference in the day without your eclipse glasses on, things started to get weird. Just as we'd been told, the dappled light under our tree began showing us the crescent images of the sun:

Just as we'd been told, our shadows on the sidewalk had crisper, sharper edges:

This is because the light is coming from a smaller and smaller point, not diffused as it is when it comes from the entire body of the sun.

The crickets began to sing. The ambient light began to seem oddly dim, but not like sunset, when the light is leaving from the side; this was dimness like a room with the light bulb on low. It grew noticeably colder, as 99% of the photons normally striking us through sunlight were now being deflected. A breeze blew, as the air pressure became affected. We could see that it was visibly darker to our west. And still we watched:

And then there was this:



I was peeping at the sky when the last light left, so I saw the diamond ring with my naked eyes. I turned to make sure the children were watching, and saw the little kid still with her eclipse glasses on, so I ripped them off her face--I wasn't even thinking about damaged eyesight; I just wanted her to see that spectacular beam of light for the second that it was visible.

I'm not even going to try to describe the total eclipse, itself, to you. My photo doesn't really look like it, but I haven't seen any photos that do. I can't think of the words to say that would make it clear to you what it was like, if you didn't see it for yourself. Just... it was beautiful. It was the best thing that I've ever seen in my entire life, and yes, I know that I'm supposed to say that my first look at my children is the best thing that I've ever seen, but I was half out of my mind both times I gave birth, completely terrified both times, both times in pain. This was nothing like that. This was just beautiful, just this ephemeral, beautiful thing that you had to experience right that second for all that you could, because you couldn't rewind the experience to play it again, couldn't watch it on TV later and get the same effect, couldn't come out the next weekend and see it again. It lasted 2 minutes and 40 seconds, all of which are impressed on my memory, and yet when the diamond ring appeared again on the other side of the sun, it felt like surely it hadn't been that long. Surely it had just been a couple of seconds.

As the totality passed, someone began to play The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" from their car stereo, and people were already packing their cars back up. The kids were beaming. My hands were shaking so hard that I had trouble taking a drink of water. We hit ALL the eclipse traffic on the way back that we missed on the way there--we only saw one car crash happen right in front of us, but the drive that had taken 3.5 hours the day before took more like 7+ on the way home, bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way.

I don't know what mood I'd be in if I didn't know that there's another total solar eclipse coming in seven years, but there is one coming, and I am buoyant. Better yet, Friends, my town is in the path of totality. 

Lemme just repeat that: MY TOWN IS IN THE PATH OF TOTALITY. MY HOUSE WILL SEE AN ECLIPSE!!!

You can come stay in a tent in my backyard, and I'll haul out the lounge chairs. The little kid, who will be graduating from high school the next month, will decorate us eclipse-themed doughnuts. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, will read and ignore us. And we'll have another powerful encounter that's beyond belief, in just seven years.

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