By Noah Salt
The Summer Solstice With roses at their peak and honeysuckle in delicious bloom, across time and culture, the summer solstice has been greeted with vivid public celebrations marking the year’s longest day and official start of summer. The midsummer month, named for the great Roman goddess of the moon, Juno — she of women and childbirth — traditionally heralds matrimony and summer’s high growing season, the time roses are at their peak and first cutting of hay may be assured. An English almanac from 1688 sternly advises, however, the need of precautions against elves and fairies on midsummer’s eve, when wise homemakers swept their hearths clean and set out bowls of fresh milk with sops of new white bread to assuage potentially troublesome spirits. Wild mugwort, corn marigold and dwarf elder were also gathered and hung on doors or burned in bonfires to prevent unwanted trouble. A cuckoo heard on the longest day itself meant a wet summer and an excellent fruiting season were likely. The summer solstice falls this year on June 20 when the sun reaches its highest point in the Northern Hemisphere’s sky. Modern solstice celebrations range from fertility dances at Stonehenge to eco-friendly arts and jazz festivals taking place across the United States, including the delightfully wacky Greensboro summer solstice celebration scheduled for the Greensboro Arboretum on June 23. Face-painting, drumming, live music, food vendors and a crafts bazaar will highlight the event, which last year attracted upward of 5,000 participants — almost all in fairy wings and glitter. A fire dance at 9 p.m. will highlight the family-friendly event. In many places midsummer day is a national holiday meant to encourage community celebration of summer’s coming bounty.
Ten Things We Love About Midsummer No chance of snow Fireflies Swimming in a mountain lake Fried oysters and cold beer Late afternoon thunderstorms Trashy beach novels Napping in the shade Mowing the lawn Flip-Flops Real peach pie
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing in the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Transit of Venus Summer’s celestial highlight is easily the transit of Venus, a true once-in-a-lifetime event, among the rarest of astronomical happenings in which the planet Venus crosses the face of the sun and may be seen — using proper protective lenses or precautions taken to view a partial eclipse — with the naked eye. The first known viewing of the transit took place by a young English astronomer on Dec. 4, 1639, and was used to approximately determine both the diameter of Venus and also its relative distance from the sun. Thirty years later, Capt. James Cook observed the phenomenon during his maiden voyage to the Pacific. According to Sky and Telescope Magazine, the transit occurs only four times every 243 years. The last time it took place was June 8, 2004, and the next one will not happen until December 2117 — so don’t miss out. Asia and the western Pacific will enjoy the best views of the six-hour event, but all of North America — particularly the Pacific Coast — will be able to catch the action, weather permitting, on June 5, roughly around 5:30 p.m. Across the centuries, a host of leading astronomers have chased the transit in quest of more precise solar calculations. The most unfortunate case belongs to Frenchman Guillaume Le Gentil, who was persuaded by Edward Hailey (of comet fame) to pursue favored spots for viewing the transit for eleven years — only to return home and discover that he’d been officially declared dead, his wife remarried and his estate plundered by greedy relatives. Litigation persuaded the King of France to restore his lost income as well as his forfeited seat in the prestigious Royal Academy of Sciences. He remarried and reportedly lived happily for another 21 years, proving Venus rules all in matters of science and love.
“June gardens are so bright and shining and clear that they seem incapable of aging. Their physicality is everywhere beguiling and as much as they are demanding, as much as the gardener must be swift with all of his work, there is so much joy in it, the stripling growth so responsive to the smallest of ministrations that his fatigue seems to get submerged by elation and is at most a fugitive thing. It is satisfying to bend and tie the first long cane of the roses, plot and space a little park of sticky cleome, try new plantings in new beds, see last year’s seed-grown clematis take off and throw bloom after bloom.” — “Summer” by Robert Dash, from The Writer in the Garden