Memorial Day is coming fast. It is the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. People will begin to warm up, stretch out the shopping muscles after a long winter’s hibernation.
Many of the plants are facing a short life. A primal urge to garden is irresistible on Memorial Day. It wanes over time.
When the temperature climbs into the high eighties, the humidity sits at a saturating 95%, and you can watch sounds slow, and drop to the ground it’s hard to convince yourself that the tomatoes, still tiny and green, are worth the effort of carrying a 20 pound can of water from one plant to the next. It was a good idea, but you aren’t Farmer Brown, after all. And they sell tomatoes at every store, and there is a farmer’s market every day on the corner by the gas station. If you go to the store, you can buy pick over the crop in climate-controlled comfort.
It is a Shopping frenzy too big to contain in home improvement mega stores. In the grocery store, the shopping carts will overflow with hot dogs, hamburger, buns, ribs, brisket, bottles of barbecue sauce, steaks, corn on the cob, buckets of coleslaw and potato salad. The call of charcoal is strong on Memorial Day. All winter, stuck inside, longing for the day when you can light a pile of charcoal on fire and throw some meat on the metal grate.
Many people feel it is the first event of summer. Unofficially, it’s as good anything, the pools and water parks start to open. People have mowed their lawn several times, and the truly dedicated have applied several treatments.
Summer doesn’t start, in fact, until June 20th this year, the summer solstice, an astrological occurrence, the longest day of the year. Unless you count Monday, or more specifically, Tuesday after a three-day weekend, (the worst kind of Monday), which makes an 8-hour workday last for weeks.
It’s a convenience to have a calendar, with the days laid out in orderly squares, represented by names and numbers. A modern tool to make our lives manageable. In the ages before calendars, roadmaps, or clocks our ancestors looked up to the sky for answers. Stars tracking across the night sky dictated time of year, the sun and the moon told them the time. They believed the stars controlled everything. Everybody needs something to believe in, something to hold onto. Before there was a bible, or scripture, or communal services, before there was “I think, therefore I am,” there was the sky, and the sky at night has a magic and a message of its own.
Our forebearers had to have a special kind of patience to notice the difference in the position of the stars from one night to the next. To look up, in wonder at the beauty of the eternal blackness and see the crawling, inexorable movement of the bright, sparkling points of light. They learned to navigate by following the stars. Sometimes they don’t seem so primitive.
I don’t see any difference from one night to the next. I don’t really look for anything, I love the night sky, the sparkle of stars, the smiling face of the moon, migrating clouds. Accompanied by a soundtrack comprised of a crackling, popping fire, the dissonant chorus of insects, tree frogs and night birds. Maybe, on a good night, someone pouring you a glass of wine. You can see the universe in the night sky, and maybe the universe can see you.
There is a special power in the sky at night, like watching a storm rolling across an open prairie. Lightning flashes making the deep dark gray, black, purple clouds seem alive and malignant. Tracking the solid black wall of torrential rain as it rushes toward you, with frightening ferocity and hunger. There is a power and majesty boiling in all that destructive energy. It can hypnotize you with its terrible beauty. Just like the sky at night.
We don’t need the night sky anymore, we can navigate through our lives, just following street signs. And the solstice doesn’t mean anything, it’s just another astronomical oddity discussed on the weather forecast. We don’t watch the storms roll in, anymore. Sure, some people have a weather radar app on their phone and watch the digital representation of the rain and clouds, lightning strikes represented by little jagged yellow icons. It isn’t the same, though.
We’ve come a long way. It takes real effort to manage to get lost when you have a GPS with you all the time, I can. And if you’re willing to work and mis plan and end up in the wrong place, you might be surprised at the treasures you find.
If you can pull yourself away from the television, or computer, find a chair outside and watch the stars, sparkly, bright, overflowing with magical illumination in the black sky you’ll be amazed at what you see, what they will give you.
You need to make some time to stand and watch a storm growing and brewing, filling the sky with light and dark, listen to the crashing thunder. Let it fill your senses with the ominous and awful power of moist, unstable air as it roars and spins, rising and dropping. Everything becomes denser, the atmosphere presses in, the air is heavier and cleaner. it’s the electric power of nature you will never look at the sky the same way again.
Everything has a reason, everything has a place, even mankind. It’s only when we appreciate the awesome beauty of life in all its pageantry and chaos that we are truly human again. It isn’t much, but sometimes it’s enough.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
