When my parents moved out of my childhood home two years ago, I made my goodbyes to the neighborhood thinking there was no reason I would ever go back there.

Then I realized the path of totality this spring would pass right over my old house.

My best friend’s father still lives here, so we got lodgings for the price of some batted eyelashes, a few chores done around the house, me talking to a granddaughter who apparently idolizes the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and some jam and brownies made by my husband. Plane tickets were still expensive, of course (especially since we were uhhhh not on the ball about buying them), but last week we flew down to Dallas in the hopes of seeing the eclipse.

Despite some dire uncertainty, the skies cooperated. Clouds started to drift through around the time the eclipse began and thickened as we approached totality, but just as that phase began, a clear patch opened up, and we saw the eclipse in its full glory.

. . . yeah. In the words of a recent xkcd comic, “A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like somebody broke the sky.”

The light doesn’t noticeably start to dim until about 50%, and up to maybe 97% or 98%, it still only looks like a thunderstorm is about to roll in. Then there’s a sudden and — if you were an ancient person who didn’t know why this was happening — catastrophic downward slide into darkness, your only illumination coming from the ghostly flare of the corona around the black hole that has eaten the sun. The sky becomes an alien place, twilight hovering overhead while the fringes of the horizon turn to ink. For a few minutes you can look directly upward, no protective glasses needed, watching the wisps of corona dance across distances our brains can’t even fathom.

Then a diamond-bright flare piercing the heavens as the sun breaks around the trailing edge of the moon. Within a minute, you’re back to a kind of cloudy-seeming day — an astonishing demonstration of how bright the sun truly is, that even a tiny sliver of it can light our way.

Pictures of an eclipse don’t really do it justice. Most of them are close-ups of the sun and moon, which fail to capture the overall effect. The way the world sinks into night for a few minutes out of the ordinary, the sky inverts and the air goes cold and the light becomes otherworldly. A close-up picture doesn’t convey why ancient people had so many myths around what was happening, so many fears about why the gods had chosen to take the light away and what must be done to bring it back. Even knowing the orbital mechanics involved, even having a precise measurement of how long it would be before normalcy returned, it was an eerie experience.

I am really, really glad my friend’s father took us in, the clouds held off, and I had a chance to witness this.