This summer morning we woke to the strangest golden light emanating through the blinds…thick light and far brighter than it should have been for 8 am, but not in a usually perky morning sunshine kind of way…but heavy and strange.

We went outside to take a look. The clouds were oddly dark for the brightness of the air, and looked almost dirty, like a white blanket a kid had spilled juice on and then dragged through the sandbox. But the strangest of all was the sun. It was a perfectly round pink ball, and we could look right at it without hurting our eyes. My iPad couldn’t capture the huge, glowing pink eye in the sky…an apparition form Mordor!

“Maybe the moon stole all the light from the sun,” suggested my 5 year old. But when I looked up solar and lunar exclipses, nothing was reported. Maybe forest fires? Or maybe we really just woke up on Mars…and have become aliens in our sleep!