Joy at Midsummer

This week is the Celtic holiday of Litha, the summer solstice when the Sun God is at the height of his powers and the mother goddess is ripe with child.  The festival of first harvest is still six weeks away, because these are Northern European understandings of the seasons, and they aren’t harvesting much yet.  Here we are enjoying blackberries and blueberries, watermelon and corn.  Lammas, the first of August, is the second harvest in my part of the world, and also a time to plan for  for fall planting..

l the Celtic holidays are occasions for joy, singing and dancing and enjoying the unique gifts of each season in community.  So today, descended from lots of Celts on my mother’s side, I want to celebrate two sources of Litha joy for me: my communities, especially communities of family and close friends, and my little garden with its lantana and larkspur, blackberries and zucchini. 

My mother loved to garden. My sister developed new day lily hybrids. My brother owned a farm in Vermont where he raised cows and Christmas trees.  My grandfather had an apple orchard and various relatives had dairy farms.  I do not aspire to their breadth and depth as farmers, but my birth family nurtured a fondness for gardening.As the last surviving member of that family. I carry on their love of plants and a desire to see them
prosper, not just as a family heritage but also a source of joy and solidarity with nature.

My friends are a different source of joy, much of it in conversation interspersed with adventures, like walking on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and seeing a Broadway musical last weekend with my middle daughter, her husband and my oldest granddaughter.  Some of those conversations are deep, especially those with my oldest son-in-law and my youngest granddaughter. Others are light, funny, joyful, sad, affirming, challenging.

Reflecting on the joy of family and friends and of making, or at least abetting, the growth of plants, I find these two joys joined together in a charming poem written by retired Unitarian Universalist minister Max Coots.

A Harvest of People by Rev. Max Coots

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting,
and though they grow like weeds
and the wind too soon blows them away,
may they forgive us our cultivation
and remember fondly where their roots are.

     Let us give thanks:
For generous friends . . . with hearts as big as hubbards
and smiles as bright as their blossoms,
For feisty friends, as tart as apples,
For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them.

     For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible,
For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants
and as elegant as a row of corn;
And the others, as plain as potatoes and as good for you,
For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts
and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes,
And serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers
and as intricate as onions.

     For friends as unpretentious as cabbages,
As subtle as summer squash,
As persistent as parsley,
As delightful as dill,
As endless as zucchini,
And who, like parsnips,
can be counted on to see you through the winter.

     For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time
And young friends coming on as fast as radishes,
For loving friends, who wind around us
like tendrils and hold us,
despite our blights, wilts and witherings,

And, finally, for those friends now gone,
like gardens past that have been harvested,
but who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter.
For all these, we give thanks.

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