07.15.14 Midsummer.  I know this old word properly belongs to that time around the Solstice, but I’ve always thought of July 15th as midsummer.  It’s about now that I begin to pay attention to the setting sun from the porch, noticing its relationship to these two big Ponderosa Pines.  It’s left the center point now, at midsummer, on its journey to the south.

At one of my first watercolor workshops, we were instructed to bring in photo references of something we’d like to paint.  I brought in a stack of sunset photos, and as the instructor reviewed my possibilities, he told me, “sunsets are trivial–you need something more interesting.”  To this day, I still haven’t painted a sunset, even though my good friend, Tini, told me “You need to get another teacher.”  It’s rare I don’t think about that teacher’s comment when I’m living in a sunset.  He didn’t know what it felt like to sit on the porch after a cooling thunderstorm and he didn’t know what it was like to mark precious time at the end of a beautiful, luminous day.

“In summer, the song sings itself.” -William Carlos Williams