Sky!

[melannen]

Being able to sit out on the screenporch eating cherries for three hours as the sun sets, and experience an awe-inspiring thunderstorm with the lightning bugs dancing under it, was almost worth the heat we've had so far this week. ...almost. What's the world doing where you are, this Solstice week?

Comments

[loligo]

The solstice this far south is wrong, wrong, WRONG! It should stay light until 10:30 PM, at least! You should need to put on a jacket by 8:00 PM!

Instead the sun disappears pretty much like it does on any other summer night, by 9:00, and the temperature never even gets down to 70 before dawn.

Midsummer night was a big deal in my family when I was a kid, and I'll never be able to recreate that experience for my children for a whole host of reasons, but the nature/climate differences are certainly one part of it.

[melannen]

Heh, and we were sitting out on the porch going "it's after 8:30, why is it so light? Oh right, solstice!"

I've never lived in a place where you regularly get sunlight much after 9 PM local time (or sunset much before 5 PM) so that I'm even weirded out when we just travel to the western edge of the timezone and sunset's around 10.

[carolyn_claire]

Our solstice was full of tornado warnings! And we got to watch awesome circulation in one of the storms that went by. It was like being back home! (Though not this late in the year--T-season is more May, there.)

[melannen]

I had a tornado warning evening in May! I had to go to Michigan for it though. Second tornado near-miss in my life. I feel the same way about summer thunderstorms as I do about winter snowstorms and autumn hurricans - vaguely guilty about liking them so much, given the misery they do cause.

[carolyn_claire]

Loving storms has been a guilty pleasure all my life, but I've loved them since I was little--the electricity in the air, the gathering wind, the awesome cloud formations and the way the colors change. And the scary, that's appealed to me, too, though I've been through so many (with and without tornadoes) that they're just exciting to me, now, though I do a lot of praying that no one will be hurt. It's a love that's hard to reconcile, at times.

[meretia]

It's getting dark really early in the Appalachian foothills, which I don't remember it doing when I lived out here. I don't know if it's being 150 miles east of what I'm used to or the ridges blocking out the sun once it goes down behind them or what. It was usable twilight until quarter to ten in the western part of the state, but it was pretty much done by five after nine over here.

[melannen]

I know it can depend a lot on how the shadows fall in mountain country, but I've never really stopped to apply that to the Appalachians. It's so easy to just not notice...

[weaverbird]

I picked blackcaps in the back yard early, before the sun came over the hill, and ate them for breakfast as is. Yum.

The midsummer humidity is building here; it's not terribly hot - yet - but the mugginess makes it feel like breathing water. Still, everything is so green (always it amazes me) that in the long twilights at each end of the day the very air seems to be green. Gorgeous.

[melannen]

Oh, yes, the green! This is the time of year where every so often I just stop and say "OMG, so green!"

...sometimes that means thunderstorm coming, but mostly it just means green.