Summer Solstice Moon
July 4th is the midpoint of summer for me. It’s not in terms of the calendar or meteorology, but in my visceral sense of times ongoingness, the one that tells me when I am, I now am between the 4th and Labor Day. I suppose that harkens back to school days when there would be the 4th of July parade, then Labor Day marked the beginning of school. What remains is a vestigial feeling that 
the next big thing to happen is the ringing of school bells.
(that’s me, second from the left on the first row)
The school bell has long ago faded and even the summer pace of work is gone, for me now almost 25 years. Yet that sense that summer has reached its climax and now speeds its way toward the denouement still sends its signals. The garden does pick up speed now with plants maturing, more and more vegetables ripening, fruit, too. The arc of the garden though does not know Labor Day, does not have a building and a bell in its lexicon. It knows the growing season, the gradual warming, then cooling of the daytime and nighttime temperatures.
With Latin on hold I’ve begun to work outside a bit more regularly since I no longer feel as crunched for time in the mornings. That means I can participate more fully in the garden’s life. Many garden plants, especially vegetables, run through their entire life cycle during the growing season, going from seed to stalk to leaves to fruit, then senescence. The school year that I inherited was one sensitive to this rhythm. It allowed the kids to come home from school during the months their labor was crucial on the farm, during the height of the growing season. The need for that passed long ago as the number of family farms has steadily declined.
Yet like my inner sense of time the school system continues on, its memory of the days of the family farm institutionally intact.
