In Pennsylvania, when the lightning bugs appeared at the end of June, around the time of the solstice and my birthday, it felt like the official start of summer. My grandma sent me outside in the evening with a glass jar, or sometimes a re-purposed butter container with holes poked into the lid, to catch lightning bugs. The humidity blanketed the hills and clung to my skin. It is a vivid childhood memory.
When I moved to Minneapolis, I seldom saw lightning bugs, likely because I lived in the city, but even when I ventured up north or into the woods, I never saw as many of them as I saw growing up. Now, the signs of summer are different. One of them is the inordinate amount of daylight that comes with living in the north.
I love the solstices and equinoxes in the same way I love the liturgical calendar. They provide beginnings and endings to seasons, a never-ending wheel upon which the year spins. With the winter solstice comes the return of the light, and with the summer solstice the light begins its slow fade. At first, the changes are imperceptible, but gradually the light returns and then goes away. A perpetual ebb and flow.
This summer, shortly after the solstice, I will turn 45. A milestone birthday. I will take the day off work, do some hospice-related volunteering, and I will likely write. Maybe I’ll have an adventure in the woods, swim in a lake, or maybe I’ll just stay home and read a book. I’ll celebrate my birthday with my wife and kid. We’ll probably go out for dinner and I’ll indulge in some ice cream (I’m obsessed with Van Leeuwen black cherry chip). It will be low-key and quiet.
In my early 40s I took a day trip to Itasca State Park, to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. I was living on my own for the first time in almost 15 years, having recently separated from my former spouse. I had started the process of coming out (again) and it was both freeing and terrifying. The world was in the depths of the first wave of COVID and everything felt tenuous.
Previously that summer I was driving and listening to the Indigo Girls’ song “Ghost”, thinking about how the first time I heard that song I was 16, sitting on the floor of my dorm room at boarding school in the fall of 1997. This music was much different than what I heard on Pittsburgh’s B94 pop radio station. Looking out my dorm window, I had a beautiful view of the Tuscarora Mountains. The headwaters of the Mississippi were half a country away.
In “Ghost” the Indigo Girls sing about how the Mississippi begins in Minnesota, and how it’s not even a river at the headwaters, yet it is huge and mighty by the time it flows into the Gulf of Mexico in New Orleans (here are the lyrics). It occurred to me that I could visit the headwaters, and so I got up early one June morning and drove to Itasca State Park and dipped my feet into the humble beginnings of the Mississippi River.
At 16 I never could’ve imagined that I’d live in Minnesota, and that I’d be standing in the Mississippi River, close to the summer solstice, courtesy of the Indigo Girls. A full circle spin of the wheel, completed.
Soon, it will be the summer solstice again, and it will be light until almost 10 p.m. and the sun will begin to rise around 5 a.m., the shortest night of the year. We will begin the slow crawl to the darkness of the winter solstice. The wheel spins again.
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No Time for Small Talk explores grief, mortality, midlife transitions, spirituality, and life’s ordinary moments with a touch of dark humor and cautious optimism.
I just finished reading Amy Shearn's novel, Animal Instinct, and I think you'll relate to the whole Getting-Divorced-Finding-Yourself-During-Covid vibe. Have you read it?
We now live in New York and should see fireflies soon in our neighborhood. Fingers-crossed that they are out this year.
Happy solstice!