Summer Solstice

This picture is a truth and a lie. It's what the sky actually looks like right when I started this post, and it's also doctored up with three filters in Pixlr so that it looks more magical and dreamy. I wish I could add filters to my eyes so that things could be this pretty all the time*.

I love my Quarters and Cross-Quarters--they feel like road-maps for how a year goes, and what I should be focusing on to live in harmony with nature as it goes--but I almost forgot about the Summer Solstice this year. And I haven't actually celebrated any of the Days in years, especially not since I moved back home and I'm sort of in this limbo where I try not to draw attention to the "weird" things I generally feel like doing instead of the more "normal" things I was raised with. I don't want to have those discussions again, and I don't have the space here, with four other people in the house, to just take a half hour to light a candle without interruptions.

I miss my Circle on these Days. And the freedom of a life that we'd built for ourselves and ran on the motto "Whatever, I do what I want".

Also, I know this day mostly as "Midsummer", and there's that weirdness brought on by the official calendar saying that it's now just the beginning of summer. My personal calendar, the one I hold inside my head, says May, June and July are summer, and it's weird when the seasons and the general culture don't agree, but it's also the way that makes most sense to me. It certainly felt like summer this May, with the temperatures suddenly going way up and all.

I can tell it's summer because...

• The last two days have been full of heavy clouds and thunder
• Every biting insect in the world is out to get me
• I can feel the Wanderlust itching in my bones really badly
• The sun is so bright it comes in even though my window is not on the dawn-side of the house
• The tomatoes I planted are fruiting and blooming their hearts out
• The pool across the way is packed with kids making too much noise in that crazy way that kids have
• Walking outside is like walking in a pizza oven
• All I want to eat are smoothies and popsicles**
• I want to clear out everything in my house and replace it with gauzy curtains and blanket forts and mellow sunny-sky colors***

How do you know it's summer? How do you live in the summertime?

NOTES:

*As soon as we can have in-built cameras and heads-up-displays in our eyes, I hope someone invents filter apps we can apply.

**In fact, I'm going to try to get my hands on a set of freezer-pop-makers so I can freeze all my juice, fruit, yogurt, smoothies, tea and whatever else into popsicles.

***And I would totally do it if I had the ability to hit a button and put everything into inventory like I can do in video games.