The Foreverness of June

June 16th and 17th

The Foreverness of June

"Mid-June, no matter what the year, is a kind of summary of all the Junes that ever were. It is a remembering, a knowing and a recalling, a time that was and is and always will be, a timeless time. The daisies that whiten the roadside are remembered daisies, and the bird songs are all songs that have sung in the human heart since hearts first sang. Mid-June is hoped-for truth and longed-for beauty and hoped-for happiness, dreams that could come true five minutes from now.

Wild strawberries ripen, remembered perfection with the taste of yesterday's youth. Pasture roses bloom with the simplicity of beauty as new as the night's dew and as old as time itself. The sun approaches the solstice and there are fifteen hours and more of daylight, within a few seconds of the year's longest span. The rains have eased the drought, the remembered sweet rains of June. Shade lies cool and deep beneath the long-known maples. Fireflies wink in the long dusk. Brooks have not yet languished into July's torpor. Venus is the morning star, and Mars is the star of evening.

The bees hum of mid-June bids one look for yesterday, and find it, in the lush meadows. Butterfly wings lead one down the hillside with other Junes. A dragonfly bids one to the water's edge, there to see mirrored the face of yesterday's June vagabond. And all around, overhead, underfoot, in the very air, is the remembering, the knowing, the very being of June and the possession by it, the partaking and the foreverness, the sweet foreverness of mid-June."

Hal Borland
"Sundial of the Seasons"
June 1963