Summer Solstice, the Supposed Longest Day of the Year

Unless you’re preparing for a colonoscopy I’ll bet you’ve had longer days than today

Today is the official beginning of summer. If you thought that the official beginning of summer was Memorial Day then I’m sorry, you’ve been duped. It turns out that Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer, which seems confusing to say the least. Exactly why we need an unofficial version of the beginning of a season is beyond my ability to speculate. Judging from the advertising, I suspect that it has something to do with car dealers and furniture stores wanting to get a jump on the sales season, but I could be wrong.

By the time June 20th or 21st rolls around it wouldn’t seem like most of us need to be reminded of the fact that it’s summer. The temperature where I live is usually starting to creep into the 90s and the humidity is so thick that it feels like you’re walking through soup. Unlike Memorial Day however, the reason why the summer solstice marks the official beginning of the season makes a bit more sense.

The summer solstice is identified in a few different ways, but all of them involve the same mechanics. Around June 20th or 21st, the Earth reaches a point in its orbit where its tilt places the Northern Hemisphere the closest it will ever be towards the sun. Technically, this is called the beginning of the astronomical summer which, honestly, sounds a bit overhyped.

The upshot of these celestial movements is that the summer solstice is the longest day of the year for anyone who lives in the Northern Hemisphere. This is scientifically correct, but unless you’re preparing for a colonoscopy right now, I think that we’ve all had longer days than the one we’re about to experience today.

Time is relative. Not just in an Einsteinian way that most of us pretend to understand, but in a subjective one that’s easier to grasp. Parents get this concept more than anyone. Every once in a while, I look over at the surly teen who graces me with her presence for a few minutes a day and feel like it’s only been a few years since she was a surly little girl. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. My daughter wasn’t all that surly as a child and sometimes it feels like it’s only been a few days since she was an infant sleeping on my chest.

They say that for parents, the days are long and the years are short. I’m not sure who “they” are, but they nailed that one. The days certainly are long and, whether you’re waking up every other hour to feed them or staying up late to make sure that they’re safely at home, the nights are pretty long, too. And then, suddenly, they’re off to college or moving into their own apartment and mostly out of your life.

Fortunately, with the way that the economy is going, my daughter won’t be able to make a living wage so she probably won’t be moving out anytime soon. Sure, it will be a bummer for her, but every cloud has a silver lining, and that silver lining would be living with me for the next five or ten or even twenty years. What child wouldn’t want that?

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.