Solstice and Silliness

I always look at the winter solstice in a different way.To me it is not the celebration of the sun beginning to come back to the northern climates. While the days may be getting longer the length of mercury in your thermometer is not. The solstice  to me is more like the choice of Atlantic or Pacific. The Atlantic offering the shortest journey, in miles, across the ocean to another land. Meanwhile the Pacific offers a seemingly much longer voyage. Why would anyone want to go to another land and take the long way? The devil is always in the details.

The Atlantic while offering a get rich quick short trip to the top is wrought with devious pitfalls. These pitfalls include large swelling seas, torrents of storms that ripped many a ship apart.

But the Atlantic also offers excitement in conquest and nerve wracking danger.

The Pacific with it's long stretch of lonely blue ocean is named pacific for a simple reason..........the name means calm as in to pacify. Blissful days of calm drifting or long lonely expanse of nothing. So take your pick. The adventurous, the risk takers the "get rich quickers" will take the Atlantic. The doubters or reserved will take the Pacific. Both may reach the distant shores. Both may also fail and sink to the ocean depths.

To me the solstice is not a welcome back the sun event. It is a time to make sure all is in order for the long dark winter that lies ahead. Yes the days are longer but they are darker at the same time. Dark as in a challenge to your ability to navigate the winter. Dark as in as soon as the sun goes down the streets empty as folks shut the doors on the day behind them and gather up in their homes with furnaces blowing and stoves glowing through the night. Dark as in the howl of a winter wind clattering the shutters and shaking shingles is somehow more sinister than a thunderstorm in July.  Though the stars shine more crisply and brilliant in winter it is as if they are doing so only because they know few if any are outside watching. Their brilliance a desperate call to the single sole who may be be venturing out into, well what else to call it, the dark of night, a winter's night.

Much of the enthusiasm is gone shortly after solstice celebrations. A kind of knowing defeat that despite our plea for the sun to return with it comes an empty darkness of cold and snow. For while we attempt to take umbrage in the fact the daylight  is getting longer the warmth we want to accompany it is doing duty in the southern hemisphere.For there the sun is leaving to head north but leaving behind it's byproduct; warmth. So a brief hurrah is in store as the sun turns pace and bounds for the north. But the journey north is more like a combination of an Atlantic and Pacific travelogue, both long and tortuous.

Such is life for the dirt gardener in winter. Oh the longing to get outside and play being given but partial satisfaction of a seed catalog that just arrived in the mail or on your Kindle.

Perish the thought! A brightly colored pictorial of a future harvest once bound and marked by the postal service now just a byline in your email in box? It somehow does not seem right. You cannot scratch notes on a catalog page online...........or maybe you can. But is it the same? Can it possible be as satisfying sitting a nook reading a Nook

about seeds? Six more weeks of winter upon you if so is how I feel. 

Perhaps if the thought of reading a seed catalog on line is the way to go then so is Farmville. 

So as we sink into the depths of winter being tricked by sunlit snow and bright blue skies by day  that will only turn dark and dreary in a few hours I ask you to ponder this about the solstice: What do solstice celebrants do that straddle the Equator?  For while the sun begins it trek back north it is also leaving the south at the same time  Do they offer up both a sacrifice and plant seeds?

Let's hope there is not a government study commissioned to answer this puzzling question.

Meanwhile spark up a fire, heat up a mug of your favorite grog and ponder your next garden adventure.

Garden advice you can dig!