Ode to the Summertime Dawn
By Michael J. Carroll
POSTED: August 7, 2016
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
Summer afternoons and evenings can be unbearable when the thermometer refuses to drop much and the humidity stays high. But summer at dawn on all but the most unyielding weather days can be wonderful.
Window and door screens invite in cool, sweet air and, if you are in a lucky place, the sounds of crickets and birds as well. Summer dawns provide moments when you are genuinely grateful to be alive. Moments when your thoughts — which may really be half dreams because you are not yet fully awake — carry the calmness and sweetness of life.
Summer. Summer at dawn. The world is right. The universe is right and peaceful, if only for a moment until the consciousness of life floods in or another person appears.
A summer dawn is a contrast to dawn near the winter solstice. That can also bring a solitary peace when you are alone in your private world bathed in early morning December moonlight. A cold dawn has purity but lacks the energy and optimism of warm-weather dawns. It warns you to steel yourself and gather energy for the shortened days and harsh weather ahead until spring offers relief.
It is best not to ignore the seasonal reminders buried deep in our souls and bones and ancestral memories from parents, their parents, and theirs before them, stretching back over time. A generation ago, my family worked the Pennsylvania mines. In winter the men saw the sun mostly just on Sunday. The rest of the week they rose and went down into pits before sunrise and came up again for the walk home after sunset.
A few generations further back, my ancestors worked in bogs and fields. They lived in a time and world before plentiful artificial light bent the natural cycle of day and night. They woke with the sun and slept when it slept. Winter peasant diets made for low-energy, barely sustaining life with tubers hoarded from summer. Life was a near hibernation until the spring equinox arrived, tipping more light than darkness into their lives. Then a plant blight destroyed their basic staple and they were denied even a meager diet. The natural mattered.
Summer flies by quickly. There is one clock and one calendar to mark off summer days far too rapidly, and another set to count the painfully slow passage of winter.
So as August arrives with its reminders of what lies ahead, wear summer like a light garment before returning to the layer upon layer that fall and winter will bring.
Treasure summer, the days, the evenings, and, especially, the dawns.
Michael J. Carroll lives and writes in Philadelphia.