Welcome to Ohio.
Burnt-to-a-crisp Drowning Jesus.
Ankle-length ponytail sighting in Dayton
Monroe, Michigan.
9:30pm sunset out the hotel window.
Today is June 20th and it is the day before the longest day of the year.
The Summer Solstice occurs exactly when the Earth’s axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun at its maximum of 23° 26’. Though the Summer Solstice is an instant in time, the term is also colloquially used like Midsummer to refer to the day on which it occurs. Except in the polar regions (where daylight is continuous for half of the year), the day on which the Summer Solstice occurs is the day of the year with the longest period of daylight. Thus the seasonal significance of the Summer Solstice is in the reversal of the gradual shortening of nights and lengthening of days. The summer solstice occurs in June in the Northern Hemisphere, in December in the Southern Hemisphere.
The word solstice derives from Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still).
Tomorrow marks the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. It’s not really any longer than other days, but the sun is out for longer, which makes it feel longer than the other 364 days. Since I graduated from college and got on some semblance of a regular schedule, time has become a bigger deal because it moves so much faster. Months go by like weeks. People come and go. I look forward to things and then they’re gone. I look back on things and then they’re gone. The machine keeps churning away. “We’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back.”
I’ve made a conscious effort to slow it all down this month and I’m surprised at how much energy it’s taken to just chill out. There are some parts of it that I’m good at and some that I’m not. I’m eating better and sleeping better and exercising better and not yelling in my car and cutting people some slack and cutting myself some slack and sitting outside watching this baby rabbit in my yard instead of inside getting worked up about whatever Thing Of The Day I can’t fix. Life’s too short, even on the longest day of the year. On Tuesday, in less than 48 hours, the cycle reverses and these days that are now long will start to get shorter again. And the machine churns on.
A byproduct of all this slowing down has been having time to think about things I haven’t thought about in a long time. One of those things is that I have a grandmother out there with Alzheimer’s Disease who doesn’t know who I am anymore when I talk to her on the phone. I’ve adjusted to it pretty seamlessly over the past few years because I knew it was coming for a while. And then something I was doing this week jogged my memory about how she would take me to this pond when I was a kid and we would feed the ducks. More often than not, she would feed the ducks and I would catch these caterpillars that were blue and fuzzy with boxy black spots. She’d be ready to leave but I wouldn’t want to leave my bugs so she’d get out some paper plates and help me gather them up in one plate and put the other plate on top like a clam shell. Then we’d drive home with the plate-clam full of bugs teetering on my lap and I would probably let them out in the back yard.
When I remembered that, memories did what memories do and a few dozen others fell out of my brain along with it. Late nights watching baseball games on TV, eggs and Eggos in the mornings, her loud snoring that kept me awake from across the house, making Christmas ornaments out of pine cones, the smell of roast beef every Sunday, singing me “Deep and Wide” a dozen times over to get me to fall asleep, her weird slippers, seeing her face out in the audience at my band concerts, the time she accidentally maced me out in Yellowstone, the time she bashed her head on a sign in Canada and was more worried about me being freaked out than about herself, spirited games of Monopoly with my grandfather, the way she’d scold him when he tried to stir things up, hiding from her in the top of her magnolia tree, rolling my eyes when she and my mom stopped to snatch rocks or moss or wildflowers from somewhere they weren’t supposed to, picking up shells at Topsail Beach… just a lot of memories, amazing memories. I get that she’s old and that this happens, but I do miss her. It’s weird for me to even say that out loud (to the internet) because I know she’s not gone. But those times are gone and her memories are gone and we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back.
The thing I struggle with the most is knowing that I can’t get any of that time back, but I think the trick is learning to appreciate it for what it is and for all of the future things that wouldn’t be the future without it. I remember my grandmother as an adventurous, ballsy, opinionated and fiercely compassionate woman. She grew flowers and watched birds and cooked circles around me and chased down squirrels with a spatula and kept her pantry stocked with all my favorite things and laughed with me when my granddad got his dentures stuck together from eating my bubble gum ice cream. Much of that might be buried deep inside her head somewhere now, but if I’m lucky, maybe I inherited a fraction of it. Someone has to pick up where she left off and I think it’s time to move on. So I’ll talk to her on the phone and see her over holidays and she won’t remember who I am, but I’ll remember who she is and how much she gave me and then I’ll work on doing some stuff with my life that maybe someone else can remember.
And I guess that’s about all.
Took a spur-of-the-moment mountain vacation to Gatlinburg this weekend. This is the view from the balcony of the cabin we stayed in. It was the prettiest thing I’ve seen since, well, the last time I was in Gatlinburg. It started out on Tuesday night with me whining to my friends about how I wanted to go see the synchronized fireflies and then we just made it happen. The fireflies were a little bit of a letdown (or maybe it was the 92,384,280,391 camera flashes going off on the side of the otherwise-dark mountain and the baby screaming), but they were still pretty. Back at the cabin, it was dark enough to see the Milky Way and a couple of shooting stars. I wanted to take a picture of the sky, but then I realized that there are just some things that aren’t that impressive when you’re not looking at them in real life.
Other things of note:
- I left my computer at home this weekend. Even though I have a fancy phone that keeps me connected now, this was a big step. I was worried that getting a smartphone would mean being more plugged in than I want to be, but at least this weekend, it sort of helped me unplug. And having a fancy phone with maps also lets me run around the state without getting lost, so that’s a big plus.
- Took the long, long, long, long way home today. Life’s too short not to take the scenic route, right? Bypassed Knoxville, which I didn’t even know was possible. I would be a happy lady if I never had to drive through Knoxville on I-40 again. Even if it tacks on about four extra hours.
- Discovered by way of the internet that Brandon is a fatty because I’ve been feeding him too much. As of today, I’m cutting him back to one meal a day and he’s already giving me the stink eye. I can’t believe I have an obese fish.
Today is still June 6th and this a thing I forgot to write about:
While I was weaving the Fit in and out of Nashville traffic last weekend trying to find someone to remove the wheel locks, I came to a stop at 14th and Church. I was sitting next to a beat-up red pickup truck at the light, and I saw the passenger side door open out of the corner of my eye. A person walked behind my car, across the street and onto the sidewalk before I turned to look. She had her hair wrapped in a scarf and she was wearing dark green sweats. I think she was a hooker (or maybe just someone who needed the money.) I watched her walk away until I couldn’t see her anymore and then I looked ahead at the light. The window of the pickup truck next to me rolled down and I could see a person waving and motioning for me to put my window down and I have no idea what he wanted. The light turned green and we drove in two different directions. We are Nashville.
