#5 summer series 2019

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Having spent five weeks in Tasmania from the beginning of April to the first week of May I feel like my sense of the year is slightly turned around. When I returned it was so green here it almost hurt my eyes after the dry autumn landscape of Tasmania. But now I have made my peace with the northern hemisphere. I love how each evening seems impossibly long. As a child I defined the beginning of summer as the end of school and an escape from New York City. But as an adult my definitions of summer are always shifting responding to the heat, the garden, my pottery projects, and travel schemes. There are visual and physical landscape clues in the grass and the the angle of light, the weed growth and deep shadows. Today the textured hostas clearly spell June, a synonym for the beginning of summer.

05 summer 2019 .jpg
"Where in the year are we? We don't need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening's longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins tomorrow, June 1. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth's tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, this year on June 21, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and light lasts longer than any day of the year."

From The Start of Summer in the Paris Review by Nina MacLaughlin, a writer and carpenter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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This page contains a single entry by Catherine White published on June 5, 2019 8:36 PM.

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