The Ferris Wheel

I noticed today that the tiger lilies are out, trumpeting orange and green by the side of the road.  Tiger lilies are always a portent for me of summer's end.   Of course it's only early July, and nothing is over.  Still, we've hit the peak of midsummer, and have started the downswing toward fall.  It's not staying light out quite as late, I noticed last night.   The tops of the longest grass in the fields have faded from the sun, and will be brown soon.   

Since I was a kid, I've had a mental vision of a year as a ferris wheel.  January is at the bottom, and it is icy-blue in my imaginary picture.  You actually get on the ferris wheel a little above the bottom, in December, when my birthday is, and then you get swept backwards and down into January and February, when you start rising, creakily, up into the spring of March and April.  By May you can see an expanse of landscape starting to spread below you and time kind of slows down as you rise up into the yellow green of summer.  And right now we're at the tiptop, and swinging here in my bench I can see how the momentum is about to shift.  I can see the yellow-orange of August in these first tiger lilies, and I know in my stomach how the lurch and drop of September will feel like an increase of speed, into the orange-browns of October and the greys of November, until once again I get dragged backwards down in the low blues of January and climb up another year into spring.

I can't imagine what age I was when I started envisioning the year as a ferris wheel, but I always have.  And we're right at the top, in that impossible and beautiful suspense before we tilt forward and start to drop again. 

Comments

[pjm]

There must be some kind of pre-school image of a calendar loop like that, because I imagine the year as a loop (not as vivid as a ferris wheel - more of a tire, I think) with the same high and low spots. It's as though you grab the year by the summer "handle," and if you dipped it in the water, the school year would be wet... but the scale is off, somehow, so it's not really half and half.

[Anthony]

the peak of midsummer? the solistice was like 12 days ago.

[Scheherazade]

I know, but those solstices don't really mark what feels to me to be the deepest part of summer or the darkest part of winter. I know that's what they're supposed to be, but winter seems colder and longer and deeper and therefore at the bottom in mid-January, and summer seems to peak right here in mid-July before starting to sink into fall....

[anthony]

understand. i've always found it odd that the longest day of the year is the *start* of summer. it would probably feel more sensible if our calendar was such that the longest day of the year was the midpoint of summer (and the reverse for winter).

[shell]

That's a beautiful description of every-changing seasons...