Summer Solstice Begins

And what better way to celebrate it than these sun yellow Evening Primrose and a yellow Swallowtail butterfly!  The solstice actually, officially, begins at 3:50 pm on this last day of the heatwave.  Seems fitting.  We may not see the sun; a spot of rain is forecasted.  I hope that's true.  We need rain.  The thunderstorms forecasted last night did not appear.  The solstice is actually a three-day event, where the sun appears to not move on the horizon.  Since I'm into the origin of words, Solstice gets its shine from sol, the Latin word for "sun." The ancients added sol to -stit- (a participial stem of sistere, which means "to stand still") So there you have it.  Our longest days of daylight are now.  Beginning on June 22nd we start to slowly lose light.  While we may say it is the first day of summer, on the Celtic calendar, it is midsummer, summer begins on May 1st with Beltane (remember Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream?) and tomorrow is the annual Fairy Ball.  Dust off your dancing shoes!