An Eclipse In Real America™
That feeling when you witness a total solar eclipse and also your husband is dead: a love letter (of sorts) to Western New York
My late husband, Rob, grew up in a small, rural town in Western New York. Buffalo is about an hour and a half north by car, but, culturally, Buffalo might as well be Paris compared to the area Rob called home for the first eighteen years of his life. It’s over 97 percent white, jobs are scant (let alone careers), and the median household income is well below the national average. Homes fly tattered American flags alongside tattered Trump 2016 (Trump 2020, Trump 2024) alongside tattered “Go Bills!” flags. Confederate flags make an appearance, too. Often.
(I don’t need to explain why people 100 miles away from the Canadian border are flying Confederate flags outside of their homes.)
When I first started visiting Rob’s hometown in 2015, I regarded our occasional sojourns to WNY (don’t call it upstate) with an exoticism that only a woman born and raised in Los Angeles could. In a way, I still do. This is as much a side effect of coastal elitism as it is sincere awe at the vast stretches of trees, the livestock, the roadkill, and the little towns with a Main Street and little else. Trucks appear to outnumber both sedans and people, and they’re parked on lawns. Everyone knows each other. You can actually see stars in the sky. Anytime I see another Black person there (twice) it feels like a mistake.
This is what they mean when they say “real America.”
If Rob found this condescending, he didn’t say so. Besides, he wasn’t charmed enough by Real America™ to stay. He escaped as soon as he could, headed to New York City for college, and never looked back. Six hours by car, an hour by air. It was another New York, another America, another universe entirely.
Back in March, Rob’s mom (I still struggle with the clunkiness of mother-in-law) invited me to WNY to watch the eclipse. Buffalo was in the path of totality, and their region was right along the periphery of this “once in a lifetime” celestial event.
“If you can come, feel free to bring friends along,” she messaged me.
I took her up on her offer but declined to invite anyone. I’d only been to their home once since Rob died. It was a year ago, for a memorial for Rob that they were holding in town for old friends and family. I brought my friend Sasha with me for moral support—hand holding, crying, side eyes, more hand holding—but this time I wanted to experience it alone.
“I’m down!” I replied. “Sounds fun!”
Real America is where Rob taught me how to shoot a gun. It’s where I saw monster trucks for the first time at the county fair. It’s where I saw white poverty for the first time, and first heard mention of rednecks and hillbillies in an almost (almost) endearing way. It was the first time I’d ever seen a meth house; Rob helpfully pointed out the dilapidated home on the side of the road. Real America is a valley nestled by grassy hills with signs for deer processing centers and gun shows. There’s a lone, sad Subway there, too, attached to a gas station. Real America is filled with stories of near misses with animals along icy roads, and even more stories about getting drunk too young and fucking too young, because what else was there to do? Real America is where one of Rob’s high school girlfriends already had multiple children before hitting her mid-twenties.
It’s where I finally saw a chicken up close. It was where Rob would admire his rifle and get into a political debate with his dad. Real America is where I learned as much about Rob as I did about myself.
When I walked into that old farmhouse I was prepared for the familiar smells to launch me into an emotional spiral or for the baby photos of Rob to reduce me to tears. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I didn’t fall to my knees in agony. But Rob echoed in every corner of that house. He was grabbing a beer from the kitchen, falling asleep on the couch, going out back to play with an airsoft gun (and asking me to join him). I’d see him typing away on his laptop, working on his note for Law Review with a cup of coffee at his side (milk, no sugar) and a cat lurking nearby.
Rob and I usually stayed in the guest room during our visits. There was a trundle bed, and Rob slept on the top part while I slept on the bottom, my ankles nearly hanging over the edge of the twin bed frame. We could have just crammed onto his bed, but we didn’t, partially out of comfort, partially because we didn’t want to be caught in a compromising position. There was only so much we could do when the door couldn’t fully close, cats stormed in at all hours of the day and night, and parents slept just across the hall. It was almost chaste, the way our hands would venture into each other’s beds. Sometimes, Rob would coax me to join him on his bed. Sometimes, I’d oblige.
The only time he slept on the bottom bed was the last time he was there. It was August 2022. He was connected to a feeding tube and a drainage tube during the evenings and nights, and the bottom bed was the most accessible space for him.
On this visit, I slept on the bottom bed, like I usually did. It didn’t feel right to change things up.
It wouldn’t have been WNY without a little disappointment. This time, disappointment came in the form of thick cloud cover on the day of the total solar eclipse.
But the day carried on in the gritty, shoulder-shrug stride I’ve come to expect from WNYers. We headed to one of Rob’s aunts’ houses for an eclipse party. A few of the other aunts and uncles and cousins were there too, arranging hot dogs and chili alongside mountains of homemade cookies, a very yellow potato salad, and an army of various chips. The elderly, half-deaf dog named Dexter begged for scraps of food as if he’d never eaten a day in his life, while a couple of cats made themselves scarce amid the crowd.
The kitchen was a symphony of WNY accents, which I can only describe as having the nasal lilt of the Midwest laced with the sardonicism of the Northeast. Rob’s was never strong unless he said the word “crayon.” It sounded like “cran.” I always poked fun at him for that, as if my California upspeak wasn’t bad enough.
Rob’s cousin Emma and I wordlessly decided we were each other’s buddy for the day, and it was with this sort of juvenile giddiness--we were the babies of the bunch--that we scooped up beers and a bottle of wine and set up the music.
“Look for moon playlists,” I suggested. “Someone has to have made one in preparation for the eclipse.”
Lo and behold, Space.com had an eclipse playlist at the ready on Spotify.
“We have to play ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ first,” Emma said.
While less than ideal, I’d argue that the clouds made the eclipse more exciting: Glimpses of the sun became a game of I spy, frantic cries of, “Oh, look, there it is!” followed by groans when the eclipse became obscured once more. But I knew that it wouldn’t matter all that much. What we were there for was totality, when the sun was completely covered, and our world would get dark.
And it was well worth it. Well worth the hours spent in the car to get there. Worth being accosted by that one elementary school photo of Rob where he’s wearing an oversized shirt, sporting a bowl cut, and offering a buck-toothed smile, blissfully unaware that his life would be cut short. Worth the distinct feeling that being in WNY without Rob just isn’t right.
The air became cool, mosquitos emerged, and in seconds a blanket of darkness fell over the town of Angelica.
Just as the eclipse reached totality, “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young began to play. I walked across the field, away from the family, documenting the moment in a video. I was on the verge of tears, but I couldn’t stop smiling, marveling at this crossroads of nature and memory. Rob loved Neil Young, and he loved that song. It was always thrown into those mixes he listened to in the car when we hit the road, complete with rockers crooning about pink moons and four dead in Ohio and cirlces ‘round the sun and wishing that they knew what they knew now when they were younger. Alive!Rob would have said this was a predictable coincidence; it was literally a moon playlist, after all. But I preferred to think of it as Dead!Rob’s way of saying “hi” all the same. So I said “hi” back.
“Hi, Rob.”
I need to believe these messages exist or else I’ll go insane.
When it was over, the dead silence that backdropped Young’s gentle guitar was broken by a chorus of birds chirping as if it was dawn. I understood, then, why people travel the world to experience eclipses. I didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed by the beauty of watching day suddenly turn to night, or this primal admiration of the sun and moon and stars, or the fact that this natural phenomenon brought so many of us together to sit on fold-up chairs at three in the afternoon, sipping beers, looking skywards.
I told myself Rob was up there enjoying this too.
Back in 2015, during a two-week visit to Real America, Rob and I went out for a drive. We ended up in central Pennsylvania, just 30 minutes south of town, and passed a house with a Confederate flag on it. There was nothing special about this one in particular, but the flag was a hot topic at the time: Just a couple of months prior, a woman named Bree Newsome scaled a 30-foot flag pole at the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol and removed the Confederate flag that flew there.
“Let’s give the flag the finger and pray we don’t get shot,” I said.
To my surprise, Rob pulled over. We hopped out of the car and posed in front of the house, in front of the Confederate flag, on this road in the middle of nowhere, middle fingers up, while I snapped a selfie.
We sped off soon after, laughing.
♡ Ashley
After reading this, I thought back to when I first discovered your writing on Twitter. A lot of people were yelling at you (what else is new) because you said Hermione Granger isn’t a real person and just because some people think she was autistic doesn’t mean we can’t think she’s annoying. I knew I’d enjoy following you. All these years later, it is still such an honor to read your work and get to know your perspective on the world. I hope one day people stop being absolutely insane to you online but until then, I want you to know how much I really, deeply appreciate your voice.
It was a very Western NY eclipse. No one was shocked it was cloudy, in fact, I think we would have been surprised if it had been nice. I stood in my parents' yard in the rain while my nieces ran around on the half hour my work was closed. I'm glad you came.