Posts Tagged ‘summer solstice’
Longest Day
Happy Summer Solstice, loyal readers! Here we are at the longest day, and it hardly feels any different than yesterday, when I spent more solo hours in a car in one day, traveling to a graduation of a grandnephew in Cambridge, MN, than I have done in a very, very long time. It wasn’t bad. A comparison could be made to spending hours on a lawn tractor mowing multiple acres of grass.
It’s a good thing there are so many hours of sunlight, allowing me time to catch up on mowing grass that keeps growing longer and longer due to the many hours of sunlight feeding it.
I struggle to find words to adequately describe how precious it is to arrive to see my siblings and their families with my mental health robustly free of the foggy, dysfunctional gloom of depression. The level of difference is something that no one but me can perceive, and it is a special joy to experience and recognize.
It’s wild to think about the reference we siblings have to each other at our current ages, having lived together as kids in our shared childhood environments.
As descriptions of aging bodies were shared, I found myself more invested in learning details of afflictions that could just as easily impact the shared genes in my body. It is often referred to as an “organ recital” when old folks get together and share the litany of degenerating physical functions that each one is coping with.
All things being relative, we can all be thankful that none of us is facing something worse. Blessings counted.
The visit was shorter than I would have wished, and triggered an urge to look for an opportunity to revive one of our multi-day gatherings. Let me just look at the calendar.
Never mind.
It was a heck of a lot easier when we just lived together at the farm called Intervale Ranch on the border of Eden Prairie and Edina, MN, back in the good old days.
Those were some fine, long summer days…
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Officially Summer
We have reached the longest day of 2020. It’s the latest hour when we tuck the chickens to bed in the coop for the night. Our fraction of a flock who have survived free-ranging among the wildlife that roams our countryside look a little lonesome snuggled up on one end of the roost.
Nonetheless, they seem happy as ever with their lot in life and explore a broad swath around the barn and their coop, heroically controlling the fly and tick population. Their egg production is enough to keep Cyndie’s and my demand covered. We just have less home-laid eggs to share with others.
Cyndie’s garden(s) are growing by leaps and bounds. With her away for the weekend, I fear the leafy things may be a chaos of excess by the time she returns tonight.
Summer would normally mean I am on a bike trip or we were going up to the lake a lot, but this year is anything but normal. At the same time, life at home is about as normal as can be. The weather has been on an amazingly even keel, perfectly balanced between hot and cool days with a mix of sunny, breezy, reasonable thunderstorms, gentle soaking rain, and calm dry days.
At the solstice, we are in the middle of this summer-ness. We can enjoy more of this for a few weeks and then begin the slow slide to earlier minutes when the hens return to the coop.
I’m willing myself to soak this time up in the fullest sense possible, in hopes of storing the memories as complete as possible for reference during the opposite time period six months from now. For those days when we go close the chicken door to the coop around 4:00 p.m.
Those days when they don’t bother laying any eggs.
Here’s to all these hours of summer sunlight!
Happy Father’s Day all you dads and children of dads! And moms who put up with the dads.
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Relative Something 