Season’s greetings

Summer arrived Wednesday at 8:26 a.m. That was the solstice – “sun stop” in Latin – when Old Sol halts its northern movement and starts heading south again.

For those who love light and believe night is good only for sleeping, it is a joyful time, with 16 hours of sunlight. The dreary days of seasonal affective disorder are long gone, and the world is bright – and warm.

For lovers of the outdoors, June 21 is a lot more significant and worthy of holiday status than Jan. 1, a dismal and silly celebration, signifying little more than taking down one calendar and hanging another, or watching Windows do it for you. It’s not a new school year, it’s not a new fiscal year, it’s not even an astronomical event – it’s just the changing of numbers, arranged by long-forgotten Roman emperors.

The longest day, on the other hand, is a real event, a more than symbolic day on which we welcome the most enjoyable time of the year, when we can relax more, play more, and generally recharge our lives.

So, a day late, we wish you a Happy New Solstice.

June snow

The air in parts of town has been full of fluff, white fuzzies drifting in the breezes like impossible June snowflakes. It’s the season for the cottonwood to cast its future to the wind and, like the lowly dandelion, to set countless cotton-covered seeds adrift to find new home sites, often covering the ground with white.

The Eastern Cottonwood is a wetland-loving poplar, a group of trees with more than usual ties to the wind. The leaves and their stems are shaped in a way that makes them move in even the slightest breeze. They shake – or quake, as in the Quaking Aspen, another poplar.

No one is quite sure why they wiggle, but the creative minds of the past devised reasons. Legend has it, for instance, that Christ’s cross was hewn from a poplar and that ever after, the tree has trembled with fear at the awful deed to which it was a party. Perhaps that explains why today, its lumber is considered so poor that it is used mostly for packing crates and pallets.

June air

June, as they sing in Carousel, is busting out all over, developing May’s lushness and adding the colors of roses and rhododendrons, and the brilliance of early field flowers like daisies and fleabanes. It is the month that moves us from the rebirth of spring to the verdure of summer.

June offers close to ideal weather, with an average high of 79 degrees and an average low of 56. At 71 and 47, May is just a tad too cool for those of us anxious to dive into summer’s warmth.

June’s name fools many people who think it commemorates a Roman god. In fact, June is short for a Junioribus, the lower or junior house of the old Roman legislature. May recalls the upper house, a Majoribus.

Perhaps the timing of the names involves an ancient political joke about lower-house oratory. June is the warmer month, after all, and offers more hot air than May. In modern Junes, we offer our own version of hot air: graduation speeches galore.