Tumbling through June…

Midsummer madness, colour and light, TOUCHING SUMMER… but not quite!

Teetering in June - out on the edge!

Summer solstice; arguably the most magical and mystical of all other days of the year…

"Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill."

― Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird

My thoughts are filled with the idea of bare feet, (I live to be able to walk bare footed) throwing tanned legs into a pair of shorts, hair bleached blond at the tips, (or white in my case) ice cold drinks with sweet chunks of fresh fruit and mint, long slow walks with my daughter. The laying down of tools in wait for the harvest and hopeful appreciation of efforts made through spring in our gardens, my annual sojourn across two departments to spend time with old and dear friends, all of these moments that bring smiles and a hedonistic feeling of contented ease are tapping noisily and more than a little frantically at the door…

But these thoughts are far, so far from the reality…

June is the month of the long, long last days of the school year and the lead up to blissful summer holidays are trickling by all too slowly for all of us involved in education; long, warm and balmy evenings await, tantalisingly close but seem just too distant to be tangible. It is always a busy month, it’s exam time, the workload is doubled, we are stressed and tired. Our students are stressed and tired and mostly unmotivated, knowing how close they are to the end they become unruly, often uncontrollable and exhausting. Our patience is exhausted also…

I feel overwhelmed.

June is the month where I literally stumble, no make that stagger through the days in a state of utter scatterbrained chaos longing for its end and for those long balmy days of the summer holidays to begin — but feeling more and more bedraggled and beaten because I don’t want to arrive felling devastated by that windswept feeling of having fought a battle and lost beforehand.

Touching a hazy summer sky, from the top of my hill…

June is the month holding in its grasp the longest day of the year, the lightest and in theory, with the most sunshine hours. As such, for me just a little sad, to know that henceforth the light will be less and less each day is not a thought that fills me with excitement albeit all the more eager to make the absolute most of every second of the two months holidays ahead…

I am not there yet though…

The free time I dream of is still just that. Time spent on my beloved hill is limited to tiny snatches of minutes between not only chaotic end of the year school work but meal preparations, ironing, housework, the wrestling of yet another bramble patch to the ground because the weather has been stuck in system of sunshine and stormy showers for weeks and the brambles seem to multiply daily! Weeding, mowing, clearing scrub and thistles from the meadows has become almost a daily necessity (it’s like a jungle out there) and any other of hundreds of mundanities.  My escape holes are tiny and I feel guilt at every stolen moment… but they are necessary in order to remain at least vaguely focused elsewhere.

I feel that all too familiar feeling of complete lunacy setting in… do you know that feeling?

I peer through the meadows, the fields of barley, the forests breathing in the silence, willing each day to pass without adding another back breaking chore to my ‘to do’ list. To have the freedom to wander, to maybe just lay a while bathed in the dappled light and warmth of balmy summer evenings… soak up the calm, I’m sighing, even now at the thought… The scents are gathering in the breeze, the Linden tree will be in flower any day, the elderflower champagne is ready for those days when I can at last sit on a chair with a cushion and sigh in relief of actually having made it!

I’m not there yet though…

This year it still feels like a long way off. I have set myself insane goals, unrealistic goals, they clutter my head with countless unwanted stresses and strains so intensely that I am now midway through a phase of insomnia so profoundly debilitating I worry that I will make myself ill and not be able to enjoy the summer at all… and we all know how that cycle of events turns out!

I hope that my vegetables will grow as big and abundantly as my retired neighbours do, they won’t, they never do but I hope anyway.

I hope that our visitors, arriving the first day of my holidays — a surprise for my husband so how could I say no — will be easy company, that they won’t want to be entertained with trips to touristy places, that they will be happy just to amble along at the slow pace I yearn for.

I hope that they won’t be just the first of a long procession of others arriving through the months of July and August with holiday smiles, out of the blue, no warning, no discussion, just a ‘we were passing and thought we’d drop in for a few days; if that’s ok with you?’ Nobody ever just passes by here… not ever!

I am touched, truly, that they should make the effort…

But…

I am not someone who does anything by halves, meals are prepared from scratch, they are always a healthy and elaborate spread of deliciousness gathered from either my garden or the wild, prepared by hand. I try dress in acceptable attire instead of my old and patched dungarees. I try to tolerate ’visitor’ mess everywhere because they are on holiday which almost always means ‘who cares’ but believe me, I have enough of my own mess! And… hardest of all, I try to make conversation without desperately hunting for an excuse to escape. All this is of course accompanied by endless, endless cups of tea and coffee.

And did I mention the laundry..?

I am hoping for miracles… but on this traditionally mystical day, mid way through the year when the sun is not shining and the sky is so grey and low and dismally oppressive it has that “the sky is falling in chicken little” feeling, my usual optimistic carefree nature is at about the same level.

But it is mid summer’s day and it’s almost over. I can see a glimmer of golden light behind the grey, so just before the dark gets darker I shall meander up my hill to breathe a little…

A glimmer of golden hope, last moments of the longest day 2023