Summer Solstice. Nina MacLaughlin

      The Start of Summer

      It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half:

      On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night.

      Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric mapmakers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are.

      Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins on the First of June. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth’s tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, falling always between June 20 and June 22, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky and light lasts longer than any other day of the year.

      We’re getting there. Here in this small city in the northeastern United States where I write from, on the First of June, the sun will rise at 5:10 am and set at 8:14 at night, which is one minute and seventeen seconds longer than the day before. For a stretch of seventeen days in March, daylight lengthens by two minutes and fifty-two seconds every day. That’s close to fifty minutes more daylight in just over two weeks. March is one of my least favorite months. Too much flat, pale light all at once. Now’s different. “June was white,” writes Virginia Woolf in The Waves. “I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me.’” What else can you say to a star?

      Long light and there’s something in the air. Frog-song and bug-song in the air. Honeysuckle in the air. Dew in the air and beading on the tips of petal tongues. Soon, maybe, campfire smoke in the shoulder of the sweatshirt of the person lying next to you on the tennis court, in their hair, smoke in their hair. And now and then, above, a whisking line of light across the darkness, evanescent, effervescent as a soda bubble at the back of the nose—did you see that?—there, gone, perception at the edge of the senses, a wish, and it is summer and there is freedom, and time, and luck to be had.

      What’s the start of summer for you, the signal that it’s here? Is it the last day of school? The lilacs or day lilies? First sleep with the windows open? Smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of the lawn mower? The fat red tomato sliced thin and salted? A sunburn? Shins sweating? The first swim? The first hot dog off the grill? Throbbing light from the fireflies? Campfire smoke in your hair? Is it the first day of June? Is it the day when light’s longest? When your midday shadow’s shorter than any other day? When the sun sets and sets and sets?

      In summer we tend skyward. It invites us out and up. We no longer hunch against the cold. We can stand outside when it’s dark and lift our faces to the sky and get spun back to childhood or swung into the swishing infinity above. Aimee Nezhukumatathil turns her eyes upward in her poem “Summer Haibun”:

      There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air

      the cool night before

      star showers: so sticky so

      warm so full of light

      The grandfather of someone I knew filled ice trays with pesto made from the basil in his garden so that in the cold crust of winter he could pull a tray out from the freeze, twist out a green-black cube, soften it with heat, and return to sitting shirtless at the table on the patio, limbs loosened. The buttery warmth, harvested and jarred, and spread on bread in winter. There’s warmth enough to look up when the sun’s down. And the sense, in summer, that there’s time enough to do so, too, time enough for all of it, in a languid, damp, and heat-fuzzed way. An atmosphere of, I’ll get to it but right now, a beer before dinner and warmth on bare legs, and everything can just go a little slower for a moment. The light lasts forever, life lasts forever. Do you feel