June 20, 2024

Summer Solstice

Today was the solstice, the longest day of the year, and the first day of summer. I woke up feeling groggy, and my wife felt sore from yesterday’s dental appointment. After a morning filled with coffee, doggy breakfasts, and getting ready for work, I saw my wife out the front door, off to her last day of her eleventh medical rotation. 

I sat down in my office to write, sipping on a cup of decaffeinated coffee. Near the end of my session, my wife called via FaceTime to let me know she arrived safely. I tidied up my desk, grabbed my cameras, and headed out of the house for my walk into the woods.

The morning was sunny and the temperature moderate. As I entered the pine grove, I heard the dogs howling from inside the house. The plants in the grove gave off an aromatic scent, which lingered throughout the property. I wondered if the deer would be out. I hadn’t seen them in the morning for several days.

When I turned north in the grove, heading toward the woodland, I saw an eastern gray squirrel feeding on the trail. The squirrels were out in full force. This was the first of six squirrels I ran into on my morning walk. I also noticed there were more spider webs than usual strewn across my path. I swiped away most of them with my hand as I moved forward, while collecting others on my beard.

The marsh was devoid of birds and deer. I shot a few photographs of a small blue dragonfly perched on a plant’s leaves near the creek. For the past week, this area had been full of dragonflies, with forty or fifty of them swarming above the water’s surface to hunt. In the background, the birdsongs and woodpeckers sounded. The general atmosphere made me feel calm.

As I made my way back toward the house, I saw several locations where I had recently stopped to shoot photos. The lighting at those locations looked so different from the days when I shot the photographs. Great lighting had the power to give impact to an ordinary subject.

I looked into the forest one last time before heading back home through the grove. In the distance, I heard the faint calls of a wild turkey. Thoughts of photographing the enormous bird in the wild made me smile. Last year, a trail camera caught several turkeys walking through the property in a single file line.

As I exited the forest, I faced the breeze to cool the sweat from my brow. On this first day of summer, everything felt dried out since it hadn’t rained in several days. I entered the house, showered, and got busy working. There were only two meetings scheduled for the morning, but by the end of the day, that grew to six. 

During my lunch break, I cleaned up the backyard and dropped off all the trash at the service center. When I got inside the car, memories of Texas flooded my mind, as the car was absolutely baking inside. I put the air conditioner on full power and opened the windows to let out the trapped heat. After dropping off the trash, I picked up food in Wilson and ate it at home.

My wife called. She had finished the last day of her rotation, but she would stay in Raleigh for a while to let the traffic die down. While waiting, she made a trip to one of our favorite grocery stores, Wegmans. This store had a great selection of produce, craft beers, and hard to find products. It was the closest thing we found to an HEB, the grocery chain we loved, that dominated Texas. Wegmans, however, was too far to buy groceries regularly, so my wife’s trip there today was exciting.

As soon as my last meeting finished, I shut down my laptop. I grabbed my work gloves, the lawnmower key, a hat, and walked to the barn to start the riding mower. Then I mowed the backyard and parts of the front yard near the western trailhead. I finished working about ten minutes before my wife pulled up to the house. I helped unload the groceries from her car, and then we sat down outside and debriefed our day.

Even though the daytime temperatures were climbing, the cool evenings surprised me. It was a great time of the year to spend outdoors. While the days felt uncomfortably hot, the evenings brought back memories of the cool nights I had spent outdoors when my wife was gone during the fall.

My wife threw some food in the oven and while it cooked, we watch the dogs playing in the yard, sniffing around the freshly cut grass. We ate our meal outdoors, sitting in the rocking chairs. This day on the solstice was so long that we lost track of the time. I looked down at my watch and it was almost 9 PM, our normal bedtime. Like kids rushing to make their curfew, we gathered our things and my wife jumped in the shower while I cleaned up the kitchen. After I showered, I sat down at my desk to write a few notes.

In my notebook, I revisited a familiar topic. I was a longtime believer that expectations drove our behavior and that we made decisions based on whatever results we expected. Sometimes, my decisions produced unexpected results. This led me to a crossroads where I had to choose how I would respond to my incorrect assessment. There were only two options.

The first was to examine why my beliefs led me to anticipate a wrong outcome. I wanted to know which part of my beliefs were wrong. Then, I updated my beliefs to gain a more accurate picture of reality I used the next time I made a similar decision. It was this constant updating of beliefs that I called learning.

The other option was to stick to my beliefs and rationalize why the unexpected result occurred. While unproductive, this seemed to be what many people did, especially when their beliefs were static. This occurred when a person considered their beliefs to be infallible.

I crawled into bed, happy that when I woke up, it would be Friday.