First day of summer.
There is something so sweet, so graceful, so wonderful about
that phrase, that realty of the one day when we actually pass over from spring
into summer. First day of summer is this week: as we finally move from the intensity
and packed activities that so often mark the month of June. Teary and grateful
graduations and antsy kids sitting at school desks daydreaming as they look out
the windows at puffy clouds in a high blue sky.
Moving vans being packed up on the streets of the city as thousands of
students go home or go away for a first job. Late June ends in a loud crescendo
of activity and then...it is quiet. Or at least quieter.
In the small town I call home it is as if someone throws a
switch to "off" and suddenly the streets are less crowded with cars
and the pews in church are less peopled with worshippers who now claim Sunday
morning for golf or sleep or the paper or a hammock. True: some places get
busier. The line out the door at the local ice cream shack often snakes out
into the parking lot. The line of cars
going on Cape stretches back mile after mile,
everyone anticipating going over the bridge and then taking a deep breath and
knowing that summer has truly begun.
What's your summer cue? Your summer start, the one thing or
event or demarcation that absolutely lets you know that your summer has truly
and finally begun?
Nature has its cross over point of BS to FS--before summer to
full summer. So this Friday the 21st at
11:54 am, summer begins on the longest day of the year, clocking in at 15
hours, five minutes and thirty six seconds of daylight. That day the sun will rise at 5:25 am for
those of us in the Eastern Time Zone and it won't go down until 8:30 pm. The next day we'll lose two seconds of light,
as the earth begins to tilt away from the sun.
But let's not worry about that. Not yet.
My signals for summer? I've got so many! Hot and crispy onion
rings from a beachside clam shack I've visited since childhood. The sounds of a
Red Sox game on the radio as I zoom along in my car with the windows down. A
late day bicycle ride on my favorite local stretch of road, grinding the gears
up a long hill and then gliding at 25 miles per hour on the downhill, feeling
so free in that journey. Sitting on the
backyard screened in porch and listening to the peepers on a warm July evening.
I've no doubt we'll all soon find ways to complain about
summer. After all we New Englanders can be cranky Yankees. We can find just
about anything to kvetch about. So much
too soon we'll be carping about how wicked hot it is or how it's raining too
much or how we just wish the tourists would go back home or how we have to mow the
lawn again or just how bad the Sox are playing.
But let's not go there. Instead let's go out to the
garden and carefully pluck away the weeds so by mid-August we'll be biting into
ripe and red tomatoes. Let's go out to
the front yard with our son or daughter and play catch as dusk settles in. Let's lean back into the sultry heat of a
July day and then listen as the hot bugs buzz away with their insistent
call. Let's just be grateful to the
Creator for a time of year when rest is possible, when time is ours' for the
taking, when memories are made and stored away, so we can unpack them next
February as the snow falls.
It's almost summer, God's gift to creation, free and ready
for the taking. I for one cannot
wait! The water's fine. Jump right in.
Last one in is a rotten egg.
So welcome back, summer. We missed you.
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