The Circle Game by Jamie Kirkpatrick

On these midsummer mornings, light creeps into our bedroom early. At 5 o’clock, there’s a hint of daylight; by 6 o’clock, it’s full on morning. My wife burrows down deep in the covers where no light can penetrate. She’s a light-sensitive creature and thinks she needs her beauty sleep. I think she’s already beautiful, awake or asleep.

We’re on the cusp of the summer solstice, the longest day and shortest night of the year and the astronomical first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. While that may sound like a good thing, we all know there’s ghost hiding in that closet. Each day after the summer solstice is a fraction shorter than the one before, and soon enough, we’ll go through the ritual of setting our clocks back an hour, and those long, golden summer evenings will be another memory. Oh well; at least, mornings in our bedroom will be a bit darker.

Sometimes I think the seasons make promises they can’t keep. As June slips into July and August, we’re lulled into believing that summer is here to stay. But deep down, we know it isn’t. 

In the back of collective minds—at least the collection of minds in this hemisphere—we hear the great celestial clock winding down again toward winter’s chill. The warmth and light we cherish today will be gone before we know it.. What was it Joni Mitchell called it? “The Circle Game?”

If you are of the calculating persuasion and want to mark the precise moment of solstice, it will occur this year at 14:58 GMT which I think means it will be 10:58 where we live. Maybe I’ll be working in the garden or out on the golf course, but wherever I am, I’m not planning any kind of pagan ritual to mark the moment when earth’s northern axis holds for a heartbeat, then begins to tip away from the sun. In fact, there’ll likely be no tumult of any kind to mark this momentous heavenly passage. Spring one second, summer the next; tilting closer to sun, tilting away from it. And yet, I think something atavistic in each of us will recognize the moment. I probably won’t howl at the moon or dance naked around a bonfire (eye bleach!) but if memory serves me, I’ll feel a brief sadness, a cloud drifting across the sun of my soul, as we transition from one season to the next. And I can’t help but wonder how many more seasons I’ll see.

The word ‘solstice’ derives from the Latin ‘sol’ (sun) and ‘sistere’ meaning ‘to stand still.’ That’s reasonably accurate because for that one brief moment, the sun does indeed stand still on our horizon. But only for a moment and then the moment is gone. There is very little stasis in nature, or, for that matter, in ourselves.

“And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We’re captive on the carousel of time.
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round
In the circle game.”

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel “This Salted Soil,” a new children’s book, “The Ballad of Poochie McVay,” and two collections of essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”), are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is Musingjamie.net.