The Difference 1% Makes
The sun is covered. It’s about like this:

And we’re sitting in our trusty van enjoying a slight breeze the buzz of locusts and the wind through the field of sunflowers to our right.
I throw on my glasses to recheck with anticipation building.
You can almost feel the collective anticipation of all these hundreds of thousands of people who’ve made their way here to Wyoming or wherever within the path of totality you or I might be.
We actually chose to miss totality for 99% to avoid traffic. How different could it really be? And we’ll share the experience with the field of sunflowers. They are watching too, large faces tilted up to the smiling disk in the sky. I step out of the van. “It looks happy,” I say of it. The transition between dark and light.

I stand to take selfies with the sunflowers. Trill joins me. “The moon is invisible in the sky.” 11:11 am creeps by as the smile grows thin.

The wind picks up and I watch the sunflowers. Do they react to the change?
The wind throws something at me. My dreamcatcher lands in my lap. I hold it up to center it around the half covered sun. Just maybe it’s collecting the power of the duality, the sun and moon, night and day, dream and reality.

The crescent grows thinner.

The sun now looks like cheddar to the moon’s Swiss. A different slice of cheese. But still cheese.
For long moments the wind stops and throws us into silence save for the ripple of a cricket and the occasional oblivious car on the road.
The heat of the sun on our skin grows less intense.
The wind picks up as totality nears and I put on a sweater, the suns intensity is noticeably absent. I look out at the sunflowers dancing in the wind one looks directly at me. And as I watch I notice 2, 3, 4,5. As if watching me to see what I will do.

I remove my sunglasses now. The scene seems flat as if the contrast of our world is departing.
The wind dies down again, playing games with me and the flowers and the grasses.
Back up at the sun

How can such a small slice provide so much light?

So close now. It’s chilly like a cool evening. Like fall is here. But the lighting is strange like nothing I’ve seen or felt in my 30 years of life. Not night, not day, not even twilight.
I stop and use my glasses to look up at the thumbnail slice of sun.

The light grows more Martian, more strange.
“Wow, It’s just like an eyelash… Three minutes to totality,” Rob tells me.
And we reach it. But 99% totality is not 100. The scene grows dark but not like night. We do not see the stars. The small crescent only 1% remains and bathes us and the flowers in even gray light.
And with that we start our engine and leave the sunflowers to their sun dance to the rhythm of the wind.

“It really puts the universe, us, and these huge celestial bodies into perspective.”
The sun is strong enough to light the world with less than 1% of it’s being. Incredible really. But we drive off a little disappointed. 99% is a far cry from totality.
