At 6:07 a.m. EDT on Thursday, the sun’s progression northward stopped and reversed direction, an astronomical event caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Here in the northern hemisphere we mark the change as the summer solstice. Here in Gold, the day began with a very pretty sunrise. Many people joyfully celebrate the summer solstice as the first day of summer. Maybe I’m strange, but I always mourn the longest day of the year. It marks the start of everything going downhill again. On Thursday, a second after the summer solstice at 6:07 a.m., the days began to shrink again. They will continue to do that until December 21st when the sun will stop its southward march and reverse its course and the days will start to lengthen again. That’s the day – the winter solstice – when I celebrate.
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| Sunrise on the Solstice. |
Here at the official arrival of summer, the world is full of flowers and it is glorious. I have always loved flowers for their beauty. I remember in ninth grade biology learning about flowers as a means for plant reproduction. Mostly I remember having to memorize the names for the parts of flowers. Last week I took an online quiz to see if I could still label a flower diagram correctly. I didn’t do so well. I understand how flowers work, but my grasp of the nomenclature has slipped a bit. As a teen in biology class I was baffled by the odd Latinate names – the stigma, style, stamen, anther, pistil, etc. I guess I still am. I remember my frustrated ninth grade biology teacher (whose name I no longer can recall) explaining to a room full of mystified teenagers that it was really all about sex. She had our attention after that. That’s when the general concepts became clearer even if the terminology was murky. She told us that the fussy botanists during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries who pioneered plant anatomy were squeamish about drawing too close a parallel between animal and plant reproduction, hence the fancy names for flower parts. But her main point stuck. Even now when my orchard is in full bloom or when I see the many different flowers in my garden I am aware that I am witnessing plant sex in all its elegant glory. And although the fundamentals of it follow a basic pattern, the ingenuity and variety of it all is astounding to me. Plants use their flowers’ colors, scents, shapes, and other subtle means to get the job of reproduction done. They employ bees, butterflies, beetles, birds, bats, wind, rain, and even humans to perpetuate their species. A few years ago I read Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World and loved it. The book explores this idea beautifully. I might have to read it again.
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| Poppies. |
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| Flowers at the start of summer. |
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| More summer flowers. |
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| A quiz I still cannot complete correctly. |
But even as these glorious flower filled first days of summer are upon us, I feel a twinge of sadness knowing how fleeting it all is. Flowers don’t last long and when I reflect on it, neither do people. “The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” (Isaiah 40:6-8) The solstice is past, we’ve turned the corner and are headed back toward winter with all its cold and barren bleakness. I’ll stop now. These thoughts are too sober for the first days of summer.
Speaking of flowers fading, after giving me hope that we’d have a reprieve this year, the Japanese beetles and rose chafer beetles showed up last week – both of them on the first day of summer. I was right, they were just late this year. So far there have just been a few. I hope it stays that way. So now I’m back on daily patrol with my bucket of soapy water, picking off and drowning the little pests.
And speaking of pests, during the week we had several mornings with spectacular sunrises. I was out on those mornings with my camera trying to capture some of the glory. One morning I startled a deer that was grazing in my meadow. It trotted off into the orchard where it paused to watch me and nibble on some apple branches before sauntering away across the neighbor's yard and down into the fields across the highway. I’ve seen quite a bit of deer damage in the orchard lately. Now I’ve seen the responsible deer, a big doe. She seems very much at home in my yard. I’ll have to put an end to that.
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| Sunrise on the 20th. |
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| Sunrise on the 21st. |
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| Sunrise on the 22nd. |
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| The offending doe. |
Last Tuesday was a rainy day, at least the morning was rainy, so I decided to paint the dining room. That project has been on my list for a long time. I moved everything out of the room and began masking. About ten minutes into it, I remembered how much I dislike painting walls. House painters run in the family. My Grandfather Rathfon was a house painter at one time and my Uncle Bud was an excellent house painter by profession. I didn’t inherit any aptitude for the job. The masking is tedious and seems endless. The paint is messy with drips and spatters from rollers and brushes. But once I started I was determined to finish. I worked at it all day – even when the weather cleared and I wanted to be outside. When Miriam got home from work she helped me finish and put everything back in the room. It looks good. The room looks fresh and clean. I’m glad it’s finally done and I can cross it off my project list.
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| The finished dining room. |
When I was a teenager, I loved the summer because it gave me lots of time to read. I earned a little money now and then mowing lawns and doing other things, and anytime I had a bit of cash, I’d walk downtown to the Paradise Book Shop and buy paperback books. It really was paradise to me – all those books and me with money in my pocket. I was (and still am) a big fan of fantasy and science fiction and in those hot Chicago summer days (it was actually Naperville, a suburb of Chicago), I explored a vast universe of imagination. Those were the days when I discovered writers like J. R. R. Tolkein (The Lord of the Rings), Isaac Azimov (The Foundation Trilogy), Roger Zelazny (I bought and read all his books), Frank Herbert (the Dune books), Katherine Kurtz (The Deryni Trilogy), and Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury was a particular favorite of mine. I devoured his books – The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and I Sing the Body Electric. But my favorite Bradbury novel was, and still is, Dandelion Wine. Unlike most of his other books, it isn’t science fiction. It is set in the year 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, and its main character, Douglas Spaulding, is partly based on Bradbury’s life. The book starts on the first day of summer and moves through a set of connected short stories. Ray Bradbury described the book: “Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood” I can’t say it any better than that. Reading Dandelion Wine as a teenager in a town in Illinois, during those sultry summer days, something clicked. I felt a connection to it and I fell in love with it. There is something in the stories that makes my heart ache. For many years it was my tradition to read the book every year on the first day of summer. I hadn’t done that in a while, so on Thursday afternoon, on the first day of summer I took my battered paperback copy off the shelf and began to read it and fell in love with it all over again.
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| My old copy of Dandelion Wine. |
Towards the end of the week the weather turned rainy. It’s rainy again today. The rain is a blessing to my garden. Everything is flourishing. I started thinning apples last week. My runner beans are starting to climb their trellises. The cabbages are forming heads. We are eating lettuce as fast as we can now before it starts to bolt. The first of the broccoli and cauliflower are almost ready. By mistake I planted a patch of collards. They were in with the cabbages at the local nursery. I’ve never grown them before and never cared for them. They always seemed tough and bitter the few times I had to eat them. But since I’d planted them – and they are growing beautifully – I felt I should use them. Yesterday I picked a batch and made some soup, a sort of minestrone. I stewed the collards for several hours in a vegetable broth with some chopped garlic, then added black beans and rotini pasta. Stacey and Miriam were hesitant to try it. It looked a bit unappetizing. But it tasted pretty good. Collards, who would have known. I love eating from the garden.
We’re home from church now. I noticed on the drive to and from Wellsville that things are changing quickly. The clock of the seasons is ticking steadily onward. I see the evidence on all the roadsides. The time of wild phlox is over and now it’s daisies and chicory and mallows. We’re heading into the last week of June already. The Fourth of July is just ahead and how can it be? Too soon, too soon.
