Solstice Time

It is 6am Sunday June 27. Two weeks of my vacation are over, three weeks until I must place the mantle of my job back upon my shoulders.

A light rain has been falling for hours. The gentle sounds of the rain on the roof and tree branches softly wakened me. I wrestled with my choices: enjoy a bit more Sunday morning sleep, or get out to the yard to right our small errors in judgment from last evening.

I arose, tiptoed down the stairs, donned a hooded jacket and rainproof boots, and headed out to the yard. Yes, we had indeed left the sheet of clear roofing over the bed of rose impatiens, had put the small plastic table over the flat of petunias, removed the top pot of petunias from the wrought iron tower and placed it on the porch.

The weather last night had called for possible thunder storms with high winds and hail. So we had gone to Def Con 1, and initiated the protections of the most vulnerable flowers. In typical fashion of shutting the barn door after the horse had escaped, we learned to go to this protocol after the first hail storm of the season, marble sized and relentless, had beaten the rose impatiens nearly to death. But now, with just misting rain, the protective barrier was merely keeping the impatiens from the water they needed.

I moved about the yard, silent except for a few morning birds, and returned the plants to their normal status. The petunias in the long front box had the look of passengers waiting without umbrellas for a train, lined up in semi-order, soggy heads bowed.

The snapdragons I had just planted stood tall and proud, covered in dew. I had purchased them yesterday at Risse's Greenhouse's customer appreciation day, to fill some old boxes that had been placed randomly in the yard by a lawn patch that needed soil. The grass in the patch had already grown in, so the boxes awaited autumn to have their contents dumped onto the spot. These were the boxes John had built from scrap wood 16 years ago when we first bought the house. They had housed pansies on the back porch every year, but were falling to pieces now and needed to be discarded. But seeing them sitting in the tall grass, weathered and tattered but still filled with soil, I could not help but picture them filled one last time with flowers.

I moved about the yard with my camera, snapping the various flower areas, including the irises in the perennial bed. John had salvaged the irises from being tossed in the dumpster when someone where he worked decided to change the landscaping. They grew for two years with only tall green stalks, but no flowers. This year, this week, at last they have come to fruition, sporting delicate purple blue blossoms, each of which is a poem of delicate Victorian silk handkerchiefs.



I pause at the hammock that hangs from two tall trees. Yesterday I had lain on that hammock, sticky with tree sap, in the beating sun, feeling the heat on my skin, watching through closed eyes that heat penetrate red and brownish gold. Those moments of hammock time are treasure coins in my mind, to be taken out on dark winter days and rubbed between my fingers, to rub their gold onto my white fingers.

Solstice has passed, and we begin to lose sunlight, a little bit at a time. The rich fullness of summer is upon us, green growing things everywhere, specks or cascades of color bursting from them here and there. People are in the parks and malls, arms and legs bared, squinting from the relentless light.

I breathe it all in, try to remain mindful at every moment, to actually live in this moment, and the next moment, of this time, this warmth and light, to store it in my skin and eyes and soul for the dark times, to live it as it is now, so as not to sleepwalk through my own life.