Tag: Summer
20JUL2025 – Photo of the Day
19JUL2025 – Photo of the Day
18JUL2025 – Photo of the Day
Summer Solstice 2025
June 20, 2025 at 10:42 PM EDT is the Summer Solstice. This is a point of inflection for my year. For the last couple of months, the longer days temporarily color my mood brighter. Added to this is the knowledge that the days are still getting even longer. Even if the weather is often not optimal, I revel in the astronomical ascendancy of the Sun.
But starting on June 21st the days will be growing shorter. Now granted this is the fairest time of the year. The sun is tropical and the heat sears into my soul. And this is like an elixir of youth for my tired old bones. But psychologically I recognize that the rollercoaster has reached the top of the highest peak and for a split second it is poised between rising and falling. Just long enough for us to look around and see heaven around us just before the bottom drops out of the ride and we plummet back to Earth.
And so, for the next two months I drink in every photon of sunlight and revel in kids free from school and looking to fill up their time with play. I see that there’s a new Superman movie coming out soon. Maybe it’s a woke nightmare. Maybe Superman is a Biden/Harris supporter. But maybe he’s still fighting for truth, justice and the American way. I’ll find out. And if it’s any good I’ll bring the kids. We’ll spend way too much money on lousy popcorn and watery soda. But We’ll get to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the 2025 son of Krypton. Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me. Or maybe we won’t see it because the reviews are terrible. But we’ll find stuff to do.
I have a feeling this is the summer we do some fishing. Dunwich is mostly soggy so there are plenty of lakes and ponds full of what pass for bass and trout. I think I can get most of them to cast a line in the water. I haven’t been fishing in twenty-five years. That’s a long time. I think it’s time I did.
Objectively speaking, I’m a relic. I’m much closer to the end of my life than the beginning and now I can actually feel it. Even maintaining my present vitality requires discipline and work. And even that is a matter of delaying the inevitable.
And yet, every day is a gift. We interact with our fellow creatures and try to be useful and positive. Encouraging the young and facilitating the efforts of those trying to make it a better place. Those are things that even a relic can accomplish.
So, here’s the official beginning of Summer 2025. I will do my darndest to make this a successful season for me and Camera Girl and the rest of the clan. I’m looking forward to all of my rituals and all of the little joys of summer. Barbecues, local baseball, fireworks, the Dunwich Fair, Fourth of July, Labor Day and all the rest. We’ll make sure we feel the sun before it retreats back into the hell that is New England Winter.
At least, that’s my plan. Enjoy.
June, Moon, Spoon, Tune
What is it about the first really hot patch of summer weather. Today was the first day where the inside of the house was warm enough not to require three layers of clothing. The attic has absorbed enough heat so that it has finally heated up the leftover winter air. It’s actually uncomfortably warm inside and I’m luxuriating in it.
And outside it’s ninety. Butterflies and dragonflies are flitting around and the birds are tearing around looking for food for their hatchlings. The moist hot grass is breathing water right into the air and you can smell the photosynthesis cranking away. I love this kind of weather. It rejuvenates me. It makes me wax rhapsodically. It makes me babble idiotically. It recharges body and soul.
For the last couple of weeks, on and off, a hatchling milk snake has been sheltering under an old sheet of copper that I put out for snakes. I have been hoping for years for a mouse eating snake to take up residence in the lower driveway wall. We have plenty of mice and moles and voles around here and a milk snake (or even better, a black rat snake) would put a real dent in their numbers. So, I’m cautiously hopeful that this little reptile is gonna stick around. But currently he’s so tiny that nothing but the youngest pink mice could serve him as food. I wonder if he’s presently surviving on insects, worms and maybe very small salamanders. Well, it’s something to think about.
But it’s not all fun and games. I’m still so behind in the repair and maintain chores. I haven’t even gotten to clean the really high gutters. I’ve got a twenty-four-foot ladder and my guilt is slowly driving me to get busy on it. Camera Girl thinks I should hire a handyman to do it but I scoff at this kind of defeatist talk. And likewise, all the other chores. They build character and spare the bank account. So, I’m putting together my schedule and thinking through the order of operations and locating rope and other supplies to set up the ladder.
Today I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen around here. Whether people call them fishing spiders or wolf spiders I haven’t done a close identification. But it was a huge bugger. He’s living close to where the exhaust from my heating system reaches the open air. I’m guessing the heat is an attractant for insects in the colder months. I’ll attach a photo here.
Camera Girl says she bought a red coneflower plant for me at Wally Mart. I’m making a row of various perennials but especially coneflowers. They attract butterflies and other insects for my photography. And finally, the other three preying mantis egg sacs that I can still find have all now hatched out. And they’re pretty evenly spaced around the property. Nice how that worked out. Of course, there were another six or eight of the things that seem to have disappeared. Well, that’s on me. Anyway, it’s an excellent day to be out and about. Nothing exciting just the good old summertime. June, moon, spoon, tune. All that stuff.
31AUG2024 – And Then, Quite Suddenly, Summer Was Over
Bradbury understood summer to a boy.
“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore window. They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.
“Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”
“Oh, my gosh!”
“Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”
“Don’t look. Maybe it’s just a mirage.”
“No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
“June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear…
So thinking, he slept.
And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The yearly ritual continues.
Peak Summer 2024
July 15th is peak summer; top dead center. And this year it’s living up to the hype. Lots of heat, lots of humidity, a pretty good amount of sunshine. As opposed to 2023, I am satisfied with the ration of summer being provided. I am watching countless hours of old movies and wandering the fields looking for pictures of bugs and listening to political talking heads panicking or laughing at the latest exploits of the Joe Biden Flying Circus and Freak Show Emporium. I’ve had to stop watching anything that has James Carville on it. The Ragin’ Cajun is so distraught that I’m afraid I’ll bust a gut laughing at his apoplexy. I’ll be shocked if he survives.
Now I will pay for all this joy. The karmic wheel never stops turning and eventually it will pay me back with pain. But what the hell. Let’s let this thing play out. Sometime in September Trump and Biden are supposed to have their second debate. I’m sure by then the Dems and the Media will have adjusted their depression meds and decided to stop their Biden freakout and concentrate on destroying Trump by any means necessary. And ANY is the operative word there. I won’t be surprised by anything but I may be dismayed anyway. After all these are desperate and delusional people who control resources that have almost no limits. Four years ago, they shut down the whole world’s economy for a year and a half just to get Donald Trump. What might they consider out of bounds?
But I digress. I read that Shelley Duvall died yesterday. In honor of her passing I plan to watch “The Shining” this week. There is a certain contrarian logic in watching that most wintry of horror movies at this most sultry time of the rolling year. Watching Jack Torrance succumb to the poison that the Overlook Hotel has served up to him is a cautionary tale for every frustrated fiction writer that ever lived. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
And just to give equal time to a less disturbed ghost story I think I’ll watch the George C Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.” I think Christmas in the middle of July is something that should not be left to only the Hallmark Channel.
Yesterday I got a burst of energy and took out my pruning saw, bow saw and extra heavy-duty pruning shears and went primitive on some small trees that have gotten out of control in one area of the property. And while I was at it, I searched out some Virginia Creeper vines that had gotten completely out of hand in the woods. Some of these vines were three inches in diameter. The trees they were climbing on were almost overwhelmed by the parasite that had wrapped around and choked them. Looking out at those trees I now see broad swaths of dead leaves up in the canopy where these vines have been cut off at the roots.
Camera Girl mocked me for all this effort for little tangible result. But self-satisfaction is its own reward. Vines, especially poison ivy aggravate me. In August I have a plan to wreak havoc on a patch that’s growing by the road. I’m going to soak them down with vinegar and cover them with plastic or paper to let them stew in that low pH brew. I don’t want to use herbicides because of ground water contamination. But acetic acid passes muster as an organic substitute. In my book the highest good that bio-engineering could be put to would be building a virus that would drive poison ivy to extinction. The man who did that would rise to the level of a saint in my opinion as having removed one of the great scourges in this world.
Well anyway, time to get back to peak summer. At play in the fields of the Lord.
Summer Solstice 2024
So today is the longest day. I believe it. Hot, hot, hot and sunny too. Beautiful. Well, the pessimist says from now on the day is getting shorter all the way to Christmas. Well, sure. But, so what? It’s a beautiful ride. And right now, only a fool would begin sighing and whining about decline. The Earth is reaching the greatest tilt of the North Pole toward the sun and we can feel the giddy spin as it starts its long descent. What a gaudy act to follow, perched here in the dead zone of Dunwich. Watching the stars wheeling on midsummer’s night and the lightning bugs dancing around the swamp makes me smile to think that some people think all this was the act of random chance. The 10300 required factors needed to make life, any form of life, happen in this universe along with all the other astronomical, physical and chemical precursors for life line up to give us lightning bugs.
No, I’m sorry. This world was made so that I could exult in the splendor of this yearly crest. The top of the Ferris wheel, the top of the roller coaster. What a fine time to be alive.
The Top of the Swing
Tomorrow is the unofficial end of summer. My family will gather for one last barbecue and the kids will swim in the pool one last time. Hot dogs and burgers will be cooked on the grill and everyone will talk about what’s coming up in the fall. We’ll throw around a baseball and swat mosquitoes. Good stuff.
But the forecast is recording an oddity. At least it’s odd for this year. We have a seven-day forecast where the chance of rain is zero. So now that it’s September and the kids have to retreat to the schoolroom it’s going to be real summer weather with highs in the nineties, something we rarely saw at all in July and August. Ah, the weather gods!
Well, it’s very ungracious for the kids but a late blast of heat will be welcomed by me. It won’t revive my vegetable garden or provide new life to the flowering plants but it will provide a backdrop to enjoy the transition to autumn. And it will give me a chance to do some of the repairs and the preparation for winter. I can collect up all the yard and lawn equipment and store it away more carefully than I usually do and fix that gate that’s been hanging crooked for a couple of years. And this year I’ll bed down some of the more sensitive shrubs so they don’t get frost-burned if the snow cover fails again.
So, the late heat wills serve a purpose. But more than that it will give me a chance to reflect on 2023. Most people do their thinking in the winter. The long evenings and the retreat from the outside are conducive to reflection. But I like late summer. I like to walk around after the kids are back in school and think about how the world is shifting. I like to feel the shift in the cycle. The days are already shorter but the heat of summer is still there and the growth is about to stall. It’s like we’re at the top of some kind of pendulum swing. The forward momentum has died and for just a second, we’re suspended in free fall, just hanging there. In the next moment gravity will pull us down, but just for that moment we can imagine the whole of creation at perfect equilibrium and with no future or past to consider. The Garden of Eden before the Fall.
And that’s the payoff of the year for me. If I can have those few golden days at the end, I’m reconciled to the reality of a New England winter. After all we’ll have Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to break up the dreariness and I’ll be busy with work and snow removal and chores and I should be busy with writing so the time will pass. And Camera Girl will have her new puppy to keep her busy. So, the world will take care of itself.
But for just a short time every year I try to shake loose from the day-to-day thoughts and just try to feel the Earth turning under my feet, try to hear the cicadas running out of sap and watch the mechanical dragonflies winding down to a stop. At play in the fields of the Lord for at least one more year.