Pagan Holly

I celebrated the summer solstice by getting up at sunrise and going to a park overlooking the city to watch the sunrise. I know I said I wasn't going to focus so much on photos going forward but my photos of the solstice sunrise over the city are so magical that they might actually be worth 1,000 words.

Midsummer is a time of abundance in the natural world, even where I live in the (at times unseasonably snowy) south of the North. It was a time of abundance at the grocery store again, too, which was a relief after a couple months of shortages and making do. I planned a celebratory dinner for the night before the solstice.

My summer solstice started with tears. On the evening of June 20, just before the sun set, I went out to our garden and noticed that something—probably a deer—had chomped the newly-emerging blooms off many plants. This is my first garden and my first garden loss, so I was pretty sad. My partner and I planted the garden on Victoria Day weekend, the same weekend I celebrated Beltane. We don’t have a yard—only a back patio and front walkway with tiny patches of land adjacent to each—but when we moved in, our landlord said we were welcome to garden. We took her at her word and pulled out a big shrub that’s invasive in our area, some other shrubs, and a collection of hostas (which I stealthily relocated to common land, where they’re thriving). We spruced up the borders with cedar edging and planted perennials native to our local area. We also expanded last year’s container vegetable garden: we’re growing three varieties of tomatoes, two varieties of peppers, eggplant, and a bunch of he...