By midafternoon the sun has burned through the last of the lake haze, and the sky over the fields west of town is a clear, rinsed blue. The thermometer on the shed says seventy-six, but there’s an ease to it—a dry, southwest wind at ten miles an hour that keeps the blackbirds leaning on the wire and the aspen leaves fidgeting. Heat index seventy-five, so for once the math works in our favor.
Out toward the marsh, red‑winged males still patrol their cattail posts as if it were April, but the year has quietly rounded a corner. Beltane is already a month and a half behind us, its bonfires gone to cold ash. Ahead, in just five evenings, Litha will tilt us into the longest day: solstice at 9:22 p.m. here, the sun stepping into Cancer while most of us are rinsing dishes or swatting mosquitoes on the porch.
Today is a hinge day, balanced between those markers. Fitting, then, that the moon has chosen this afternoon to disappear—new and invisible, somewhere above the bright sky. Tonight will come on without a curve of light in it. Just the afterglow over the lake, then the slow studding of stars once the last freight rolls through.
Up in Door County the understory is busy with its own quiet festivals. Pink moccasin flowers have opened in the dim light beneath the pines and hemlocks, their strange little slippers held out like an offering. Pagoda dogwood is blooming along the edges of old farm lanes, each tiered branch set with white lace. Thimbleberries, too, are in flower—delicate five‑petaled faces that, if all goes well with bees and weather, will be red cups of sweetness by high summer.
We don’t have moccasin flowers on this edge of the village, but we rhyme with them. Out back the wild columbine is finishing, its last lanterns going rusty while the first raspberries show the faintest blush. The hayfield across the road, cut early last week, is already greening over, the swallows scribbling low after insects swept up by the mower. You can feel the push now: everything that spent May unfolding is bent on thickening, ripening, making seed.
Along the south fence the pagoda dogwood we planted five years ago is finally joining the chorus—small, but earnest, with its own scatter of cream blooms. Standing there, I can hear the steady work of June: the hum in the flowers, the wind combing the brome, the faint clink of rigging from the marina a mile off as the southwest breeze reaches the harbor.
We are five days from the longest light and starting down the far side of the year, though you wouldn’t guess it from the fresh leaves or the coolness of this particular Monday. The world feels newly made: sun high, moon hidden, berries still only a promise. Out here at the edge of town, it seems the right posture is the one the thimbleberries take—roots deep, flowers open, receiving what comes on the wind.