Six months and four days ago, I was standing in my driveway with my two sons, enjoying the glow from a roaring fire of spruce and cottonwood. It was their dad's weird way of welcoming the winter solstice. I had stirred myself out of my winter torpor long enough to do something ceremonious and break the monotony of December's infernal darkness.
Summer solstice came and went this weekend, but I was too busy to do anything special. I didn't hike up Flattop and camp out. I wasn't out killing fish. I didn't go downtown to the festival in Town Square. I didn't go to the late night solstice baseball game at Mulcahy.
No, I was home in the yard, doing battle with weeds and my anemic lawn. I filled a small dumpster with all sorts of annoying stuff that was growing in the wrong places. My yard is supposed to be an aesthetically pleasing mix of the wild and the neatly tended, but it isn't working. Despite all my effort, the yard looks about as good as Joe Biden does with his goofy hair transplant. Too much effort; not enough results.
Part of the problem is all the brown spots, compliments of my beloved dog. His bladder has the capacity of a fire truck. That's great for me, because I can sleep in without having to rush him out the door to pee in the morning. But woe unto the patch of lawn where he goes -- within a couple of days, it will look like it got hit by a blowtorch.
I never sleep very late in the summer anyway. All the daylight is actually annoying. I stay up 'til it starts to get dark -- around midnight -- and then start to stir when daylight seeps through the shades at 4 a.m. How's an ink-stained wretch supposed to get any rest in the summer? No wonder I'm always tired in the afternoon.
A colleague here at the paragraph factory said what we Alaskans need is real daylight savings time -- save it in the summer and use it in the winter. If we could do that, summer solstice wouldn't be such a special occasion, but I'd sure find the time to celebrate that arrangement.
Matt Zencey