Summer

 

In our principal contemporary calculation, summer will not officially begin in our northern hemisphere for another three weeks, when the summer solstice occurs on June 21 at approximately 10:58 a.m. EDT. According to one traditional medieval way of calculating the seasons (which sees the solstice or equinox at the season's mid-point instead of its beginning) summer began on May 1. That said, in our American secular society today, we have become accustomed to treating Memorial Day (or, more precisely, the Memorial Day "holiday weekend") as the de facto beginning of summer, what I call the cultural (as opposed to the astronomical or meteorological) summer, which extends (again culturally) from the Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day.

An added complication to what gets culturally considered as "summer" is the variation in school schedules around the country. I have long believed that the school "summer vacation" is an unjustifiable anachronism that needs to give way to year round schooling. That said, in this part of the country, where elementary and high schools end their academic year in late June and start in early September, "summer" is mainly July and August. In other areas, the school year ends in May and starts in early August. So, for example, when I was in Tennessee for 10 years, we treated June and July as the summer months, and August was "back to normal" month.

I am old enough to remember when spring was really still spring, which meant that, while by June 1 we might already have hot summer weather, we also might not. This year, for whatever reasons, we have been enjoying a relatively mild spring, that seems to have helped put off as long as possible the onset of summer's enervating heat and humidity. That said, with the temperature supposed to be hitting the 80s today, summer (however mild so far) is certainly here. And the ominous predictions in the news are for a seriously hot rest of the summer. According to Tuesday's NY Times: "Ocean temperatures, soil moisture, forecast models and long-term trends are all contributing factors in predicting a warmer-than-normal summer this year. The coasts of New England could be hot because the Atlantic Ocean already feels like summer, while the center of scorching temperatures will once again almost certainly be the Southwest."

 About all that, well, time will tell.

(Photo: June from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is widely considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination. The illustration depicts summer fieldwork against the background of  the Palais de la Cité and the Sainte Chapelle.)