Midsummer's Night

Happy solstice kids! Today is the longest day of the year. For me at least there is always something magical about solstice. Whether it is the longest day of the year or the shortest. In the winter it seems like the end of the slow decline into the dark and that the days will eventually start to lengthen noticeably and that warm weather will finally return.

The summer solstice is more about beginnings. Summer is truly on. Long hot lazy days are being promised. I think of days long past. Summers in the Green Mountains where constellations of fireflies danced in the black evening. Too hot to sit in the house, winding down the day in the backyard playing tag or hide and seek out in the yard until we were finally called into the house and to bed.

Later, long hot sunsets out at the lake with friends, sitting on the hood of a Chevy, drinking beer, making plans for what our lives would be like once we were real adults. The rest of life stretching before us as full of potential as the brief months of summer before us. The optimism and hubris of youth.

Later, it would be sunset parties out at Race Point, watching the sun set over the ocean, cocktails in cutoffs and t-shirts, feeling the days heat ebb away from the sand under our feet, the gentle soothing sound of the ocean breaking on the shore. Discussing the days misconduct and planning the evening. Who was hot, who was not and who we were hoping to maneuver into bed. There seemed no finer thing in this life than to be in love or lust or both. Happy that we were young and secure in the knowledge that we would never grow any older.

Once again the promise is hanging out there, tantalizing, unrealizable. Hot days, cool oceans, sand under bare feet, short nights that just might hold adventure. Is it any wonder that days like this seem like magic?

"I have had a dream, - past the wit of man to say what a dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was- there is no man can tell what. Methought I was and methought I had, - but man is but a patcht fool, if he offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer's Night Dream

Have a great summer everyone.