Green Wood Spoon Maker

It’s been a long year since last summer solstice…that day a year ago I remember I smashed my finger in a cant hook while “milling” a timber in the yard with the chainsaw, and later that day some dudes tore by our house driving totally crazy in a rusty truck yelling obscenities. I wonder now, were these omens?

So much happened between that day a year ago, and today Summer Solstice 2026. The challenges of those 12 months are still exacting tolls, overshadowing the joyful occasions peppered here and there. There was just something about it, something that lingers, definitely scars. Forward movement and backward movement. Joy and sorrow.

There is, most every year in Vermont, just one day when the greenness of summer bursts out completely and suddenly you are in a landscape so unfamiliar after 6 months of winter…and instantly, amnesia washes over your frozen heart, an orange ray of light pierces your eye and winter is gone.

Today at 4:25am, without alarm, I woke up and looked at my clock, at appointed moment of the solstice, and a steady rain fell pattering the tin roof.

It is also strangely the first fathers day without one among the living, but not the first day without a father to be exact. Death is the mystery we are all headed for, but only the living decide how they shall live. Are you alive? Are you here in the world with me? Then live here, with both hands, live now.