It's All Downhill From Here

I love summer, which started officially 17 minutes ago, when the sun reached directly overhead of a point along the 23.5-degree latitude. That’s as far north as it gets. It’s all downhill from here. Since the winter solstice, the overhead sun has crept ever northward. Starting a few minutes ago, it proceeds southward. As a Bokononist might put it, so it goes.

This is not directly correlated to the length of the day or the temperature. For some reasons which I have never understood, the longest and shortest days do not occur on the solstices. It’s easier to understand why temperature doesn’t hit a high in late June, and a low in late December. The earth itself heats up and cools down, along with its atmosphere. It takes a bit for the temperatures to hit their highest and lowest points.

But the cause of the seasons is a matter of very simple solid geometry. A given quantity of sunlight falls on a small area of the earth today. Come wintertime, that same quantity will be spread out over an area more than twice the size. The same amount of heat, spread out over a larger area, equals cold. We in the northern hemisphere, in fact, are fortunate that the Earth is farthest from the sun during the summer solstice, and closest during the winter solstice. Consequently, both our winters and summers are milder.

I try to paint outdoors during the solstices and equinoxes, although I don’t always make it. I did today, wandered to a marina along the Ohio River in Kentucky. An arrangement of beached boats looked appealing to me.

It was 3:00p, almost three hours before the solstice. It was also quite hot, although heat seldom bothers me. My intention was to describe the scene in just one sitting. Sometimes I’m able to do that. Sometimes not.

My favorite thing about summer is attempting to describe blindingly hot sunshine on canvas. Again, sometimes I’m able to do that, and sometimes not.

I guess we’ll know tomorrow whether I will have been able to describe blinding sunshine. But we know already that I was unable to complete the picture in the 1-1/2 hours I gave the enterprise. The canvas is currently baking on my truck’s dashboard. in a few hours I’ll scrape it down, and come tomorrow I’ll have a dry and cooperative surface upon which to work. That’s another thing I love about summer. You can dry off Day One quickly, making Day Two possible the following day.