The Window Will Open

On sitting still through the solstice

There’s still some light in the sky at 9:09pm on the longest day of the year when I get into bed. Above the black trees, the sky shimmers a Cinderella blue. Solstice blue, you might call it, for tonight is the season’s hinge, a portal into that period of watermelon and lightning bugs, swimming holes and sparklers, sprinkler screams and ice creams with sprinkles. Summer is a pinwheel flashing its colors, and the solstice is the moment when a window is opened and the wind comes in. With a whoosh and rustle of the wheel, my favorite season is set into motion. And I am sleeping through it.

Despite every bone in my body telling me to run into the garden to catch the late light, I’m heeding everyone’s advice to sleep when the baby sleeps. We’ve finally put River down after an epic battle of flailing arms and clenched fists, his eyes closing and then flying open again to reveal the newborn-blue of his irises. He is three weeks old, and he has ushered in a solstice of his own. A flood of light lingering in the farthest reaches of our universe.

I watch the beautiful days of June pass from the window of the nursery. I watch dawn rise and dusk fall, the curtain call of midnight, 3am’s velvet tongue. I watch the runners and bikers pass by all afternoon, the women with their big dogs. Teens walk the train tracks at the back of the yard, and the neighborhood tomcat—black as shadow—sidles out from a thicket of barberry. All this, I watch and wish the window of this room would open. I want to be out in the world. But River is my world now—my daylight, my moonlight, and my every season. 

The word solstice, I learn, comes from the Latin for “sun” (sol) and “to sit still” (sistere). How reassuring it is to find out that embedded in this day is actually the permission for suspension as our life force comes to rest in the sky for the longest stretch of time. It seems to luxuriate in place, to sit still as I do, here in this room where the walls are painted a yellow called Sunflower. And so I celebrate my solstice from the repetitive orbit of the rocking chair, with the let-down of life force from my breast.

These days are fleeting. Seasons, solstices: there never seems to be enough time to honor them before they’re gone. But I remind myself that there will be more summers, more portals, more vacant blue Junes. I will be outside again; the window will open. This moment with River, though—his tiny seashell ears, his new eyes not yet brown—will never return.