Author Archives: John Cutrone

Jun 23 2016
Midsummer, Solstice, St. John's Eve

Midsummer Magic

Midsummer, and all here is now hustle and hubbub as we prepare for the Midsummer Makers Marketplace at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts this Saturday. We’ll be there with a dozen other local makers and small creative businesses celebrating the local, the seasonal, and the handmade. We plan to show our full selection of culinary herbs and herbal teas from the Sabbathday Lake Shakers, our own framed letterpress prints, and copies of our book Putting Up Mangoes, for we are in the thick of mango season here in Lake Worth. I think we’ll bring a basket of mangoes, too, for it is that time of year when the magical fruits begin piling up, in the sink, in bags, in every nook of the refrigerator. An embarrassment of riches. I hope you can come see us; the marketplace runs Saturday June 25 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Jaffe Center’s satellite book arts studios on the Florida Atlantic University campus in Boca Raton at historic building T6, near the FAU Football Stadium. There will be Makers Marketplace roadsigns to guide you in. Admission is free and so is parking.

Tonight, Old Midsummer, St. John’s Eve, Seth and I will light a fire in the backyard and we’ll have some celebratory something with it, joining in the fire tradition with people all over this globe. Perhaps you can join us in your way, too. Here, for your Midsummer night’s planning, is a reprint of a Book of Days chapter on St. John’s Eve from a year or so ago. Read it again, and connect with Midsummer traditions near and far. Happy Midsomer. ~ John

 

Viola Tricolor

St. John’s Eve, tonight, brings Midsummer. In the seasonal round of the year, we now sit directly opposite Midwinter and Christmas. The celebrations for both Midwinter and Midsummer are old celebrations, older than you or I or anyone can recall, older even than the events assigned to them by the early Church, for the Church early on recognized that honey draws more flies than vinegar, and in that spirit, old pagan celebrations continued but with new names and new focus. Hence the birth of Christ was set at the winter solstice and the birth of John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, setting the path straight for the savior, was set at the summer solstice.

St. John is unusual in that he is remembered not just on the day of his death (which is the case with all the other saints) but also on the day of his birth. And as is often the case with traditional holidays, it is the eve the night before when the real celebration occurs. My take on this is that there is a certain magic to nighttime events: perceived magic if not real, though our ancestors thought nights like Midsummer and Midwinter full of real magic and open to the realm of fairies and sprites and other folks of parallel universes. You need only look to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set on this very night, to grasp the beliefs.

But no matter whether you give credence to these other realms or not, there is no denying the air of mystery that accompanies a celebration at night. We hang fairy lights in the trees, we light candles and beseeching fires, we walk amongst flowers that bloom only at night and spice the air we breathe. We take our celebration outdoors and the stars and moon are above us and this is infinitely more mysterious than the ceilings in our homes. This, too, is magic, as powerful as any other.

Midsummer and St. John’s Day are not much celebrated in the States, much to our loss. But in other places, this is a night to spend out in the open air. In Scandinavia, with the sun at its northernmost point in the sky, this is the time of the Midnight Sun (how magical is that?). It is a night there for bonfires and meals of pickled herring and new potatoes with sour cream. Further south in Italy bonfires are also part of the night, but the meals vary by region. In Rome, the Midsummer meal centers around snails; local belief holds that eating snails, horned as they are like devils, will protect you from Midsummer mischief. In the towns of Northern Italy, Midsummer is a time to break out balsamic vinegar, aged as long as a hundred years. Every part of the meal has some of this nectar of the gods in it, for the lore of the land says that this is the time of year when the must enters the grape on the vine, and it is the must that will eventually become both the wine and the balsamic vinegar (again, magic). The must is the juice, crucial to both, for good balsamic vinegar is made from must just as is wine. It is then aged all those years in casks of various types of woods: at least a dozen years, but, as mentioned above, sometimes a hundred years or more.

It is a night to go and gather plants for their magical properties: fern seed and St. John’s Wort. The latter will protect you from evil, the former, if gathered properly, is believed to confer the power of invisibility. But not without some peril: the seeds are fiercely guarded by the fairy folk who know more of these secrets than do we. The magical properties of plants also play into Shakespeare’s comedy. Have you ever wondered what is the “herb” (a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound) that Oberon instructs Puck to fetch and squeeze the juice of onto the eyelids of Titania and then of the lovers? Well, these are the things I wonder about. Oberon goes on to tell us that maidens call it “love-in-idleness,” but in modern terms it turns out the herb is a flower known as Viola Tricolor, also known as Heartsease or Wild Pansy. You may have some blooming now in your summer garden. So much magic, so close to home. Make the most of it. Happy Midsummer.

Image: Viola Tricolor, Plate No. 227 in Bilder ur Nordens Flora by C.A.M. Lindman, published in 1905. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jun 20 2016
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Solstice

Clockwork of the Heavens

Off_on_a_Comet

I ponder sometimes the mechanics of our planet: how it rotates on its axis as it travels around the sun while shifting in its seat, giving us our earthly seasons. If I think hard enough about it, I can imagine the sound of it, a great creaking, the movement of something massive. Is there a sound to the motion? I do not know. But I do imagine it that way, like the workings of a clock, a mechanical pendulum of a celestial object: a celestial clockwork.

This is one of those days that brings this to mind for me, for here again today our planet reaches a turning point. It has been tilting ever so slightly each day to the south, pointing the Northern Hemisphere toward the sun and the Southern Hemisphere away from the sun, since December’s solstice. Now we come to the June solstice, and for a time things seem to stand still, but then of course the counter, the opposite, and the great planet begins shifting to the north. From this point on, days will start lengthening in the Southern Hemisphere, while for us here in the North, days will begin getting shorter.

That brief time of things appearing to stand still is the source of our word solstice. It is from sol stetit, “sun stands still” in Latin. But it is an illusion; the rearranging is constant and unceasing. And so our days begin to grow shorter, even as summer by the almanac just begins… which is why our ancestors saw this time as the midpoint of summer, hence the Old Midsummer celebrations that will soon come to pass in the places that celebrate old traditions like St. John’s Eve. The Church tuned into these celestial events, too, and early on assigned the time of the Winter Solstice to the birth of Christ and the time of the Summer Solstice to the birth of the prophet who baptized him, St. John the Baptist. And just as Christmas Eve is considered by many a time of magic, when animals can speak and water turns to wine, so is St. John’s Eve a time of magic, too. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place on St. John’s Eve, and look what happens there: men are transformed to asses and fairies meddle in the romantic interests of mortals. It has long been held that magical things can happen at these junctions of the culminating points of Earth’s celestial mechanics.

The precise moment of the solstice this time around is 6:34 PM today, June 20. That’s here in Lake Worth, on the eastern edge of North America, in Eastern Daylight Time. If you are searching for the precise moment where you live, use that as your guide. Myself, I am not one for precision, being much more content with roundaboutness. And so tonight in this house we will mark the occasion with the acknowledgement that it has come and that it has passed, for by the time it happens, the great mechanics of the planet will have it begin shifting again. The summer solstice comes as well this year with a bonus gift: a full moon.

Image: An engraving from the 1877 novel Héctor Servadac, or Off on a Comet, by Jules Verne. The illustrations are by Paul Phillippoteaux.

 

Jun 19 2016
8 Comments
Father's Day

My Father’s Patience

uncle john playing pool

I think my dad would not put up a fight if I told you he is not the most patient man in the world. And then who does he get for a kid but me, a kid who at times required an extra measure of patience. And still does. Dad will watch me fumble with screwdrivers and wrenches, or he will stand above me at the open hood of the truck while I am beneath it, on my back, reciting aloud “righty tighty, lefty loosey” (and which way exactly is lefty when you are on your back beneath the truck, anyway?) praying to God, hoping to God that I am not about to make the oil filter even tighter than it was the last time I turned it the wrong way. He shakes his head and no doubt thinks, “Where did this kid come from?”

And it has always been thus. One of my earliest memories of Dad/Son quality time is of Dad setting up my electric Aurora race car set. We got the tracks laid out, the hairpin curve, the traffic light, the whole works, and then he said, “Okay, give me some juice.” I went to the kitchen, poured a glass of orange juice, and brought it to him. There was some head-shaking that day, too.

We all have our strengths. Dad’s strength––his superpower––is knowing all this stuff, knowing how tools work, knowing instinctively which way to turn the oil filter for an oil change. And they are our superheroes, from the start, our dads. Today, Father’s Day, we honor them all: the dads we were given, the dads who chose us, the dads we have chosen ourselves, for they come in many varied types. Sometimes they are our grandfathers, or our uncles, or brothers or old friends who just seem like dads to us. The definition is loose, but the shoes to fill are large.

These days, Dad says “thank you” a lot to me, and to Seth, the other son I gave him. I always say “thank you” in return. He stood there at our wedding, and I imagine that is not at all something he would have pictured himself doing if you had asked him years ago. But he did stand there for us, and I know he was proud of us, and completely welcoming and loving. At least Seth knows how to handle a socket wrench. Perhaps Dad figures I’ll be all right, after all. He did a good job. And so to my father, to Seth’s father, to all our fathers: Happy Father’s Day.

Image: My cousin Maria found this photo taken in the basement (“a bass’u cell,” in my grandparents’ dialect) of our old family home in Valley Stream, New York. That’s my dad on the right in the striped shirt; to his left is Doc, then Grandpa, and at the far left is Frank. Great guys every one, all worthy of happy Father’s Day wishes. There is Grandpa’s cuckoo clock; he pulled the weights up each morning. This was the same room as the race-car-juice incident.

 

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