Soon After the Summer Solstice

So already, summer's here, and I've been keeping my eye on it--its trees, its flowers, its birds, its light and skies. In terms of the birds, I've been watching hawks like a hawk. In terms of trees, it's been Japanese lilacs.

I've also been keeping my nose on summer. As I write this, I'm sitting next to my living room window breathing in the fragrance of the humid, warm, alternatingly blue and gray morning just beyond it. Sweet, but not too sweet.

 

In truth, some of the hawks I've been watching are actually other kinds of raptors. Of late, I've been enraptured by raptors. 

 

First, there are the local hawks, the marsh hawks (or northern harriers, as they are often known) that often don't move even when I walk pretty close to them on the paths in and around the Black's Creek salt marsh. Then, there are the "at the field at our cabin" hawks, the Cooper's hawks that sweep by us at eye level as they jet from some clump of low branches or shrubs at the edge of the field to another right next to our cabin, and the buzzards and vultures (which actually aren't hawks) that soar above our field and our neighbor's, eyeing their next meal. The hunt is always on. As I said when I posted in May, "In the Midst of Life We Are in Death."

 

Last Wednesday, the summer solstice*, I was surprised to see this last type of raptor--not a usual site in marshy yet urban Quincy--when I took an afternoon walk. So here's my account of that solstice walk and the thoughts it conjured.

Two hours after the solstice moment, I walked out on the most perfect summer afternoon: bluest blue skies, cumulus clouds at the distant horizon, seasonal warmth tempered by a subtle sea-breeze, and no humidity: not a drop of moisture to coalesce with others to create even the thinnest milky veil to soften the day’s crisp edges and hues.

So fragrant was the air on the first tree-lined street down which I headed that my eye was drawn to the ivory blossom clusters overhead. Never before had I noticed the delicate fineness of the multitudes of tiny blossoms that together formed each of canopy’s many-flowered fists. Each individual blossom seemed rendered in pen and ink, the pen tipped with the thinnest of nibs.

What were these trees, I wondered. I snapped a picture of one of them and a few of its blossom clusters, hoping my cellphone would do what it often does when I photograph a bird: ask if I wanted to know what kind it was. But my phone acted only as a camera and offered no assistance.

Suddenly, the faintest whiff of something too sweet distracted me from my olfactory reverie—so briefly that I paid it no mind, though I noticed it.

One house ahead, two men stood next a Department of Conservation and Recreation truck. Synchronicity, I thought: the world gives you what you need. For sure, one of them would know about the trees. So I approached and asked.

“Let’s stroll down to that tree so I can have a good look,” one of the men said. And so we did. “Japanese lilac, I think,” he said. “If not, some not-so-common kind of dogwood.” [My laptop later confirmed his first answer.]

Not the first lilacs I’d seen that weren’t purple. I thanked him, and continued on, passing other Japanese lilac trees, breathing them in, glorying in the afternoon’s summer riches.

And suddenly, another brief, cloyingly sweet whiff of—perhaps decay? Where was it coming from? I glanced upward and observed the telltale rust on the edges of two flower clumps.

And isn’t it like this every June—that even on the longest day, when none of summer’s long days have been squandered, when the possibility of life and bliss seems infinite, Nature tosses out some subtle reminder that life and death are ever linked and that summer is just one season in an endless cycle?

Later, as I walked the final leg of my walk, a fleeting shadow on the shimmering grass of the salt marsh pulled my eye upward: above, a turkey vulture soared high, circled, drifted, and swooped. And isn’t it like this on every walk—that Nature, often graceful and pleasing to the eye, reminds us that Nature feeds and thrives on Nature?

* Summer Solstice 2019. Contemporary abstract painting by Jen Gray. Inspired by the sunrise and sunset on the summer solstice 2019. All images copyright 2017-2019 Jen Gray, GrayBirds.org. All rights reserved. Available for purchase on Pixels: https://pixels.com/featured/summer-solstice-2019-jen-gray.html.