Who is the blind woodchuck?

The blind woodchuck is a mythical creature sent in 2017 to warn us about lurking dangers as we all prepared for the first total solar eclipse viewable in the United States in a nearly a century. Because she is terrible at listening, she spent four minutes relaxing on her back in the meadow staring at the celestial event. Fortunately, she fell asleep (it was dark!) and only burned her corneas a little bit. She enjoyed the other animals’s reactions to the sunglasses she wore while she was healing, and adopted them as her trademark look. She has not realized that the rest of the forest sees them as a metaphor for her short-sightedness about the world and lack of interest in other mammals in general. She has considered changing her name to Ray Ban. Now she huddles in her safe and cozy burrow, convinced that the eclipse was the warning we all missed about the pandemic and the political earthquakes that strengthened in 2016. She is completely wrong, of course, but then she is a rodent with a brain the size of a pea. She wonders what other people’s excuses are.

The next total eclipse is happening in 2024, and once again, the woodchuck will be there to document this remarkable solar event that proves we are all just insignificant specks in the universe. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to vote!

Occasionally she rents out her domain to The Ripple Effect, a chronicle of random life musings that are influenced by things that happen outside her burrow. Do the author and the rodent share an identity? Hmm. Have you ever seen them in the same room together?