Summer Solstice

It was the longest day of the year. And it was going to be the longest day of the year in what I thought would be the worse sense – I didn't want to be away from home, and my flight back to Ottawa had been scheduled for nine P.M., getting me home after dark. A taxi strike was set to cut off access to the airport on the way home. And when that threat evaporated, we sat on the tarmac for half an hour, queuing up much longer than expected to take off - “I'm afraid it is rush hour,” the pilot said.

When we got airborne, I received yet another lesson that all the maddening things that make us impatient are an opportunity to peer through a window of hope and beauty. Because it was the longest day of the year, the sun began to go into its golden last hour just as we rose into the air. We soared into the cumulus clouds, and at first, they turned my window into an opaque milky-white view port. But as we rose higher, large windows would break open into the clouds. I looked up at these openings, and saw huge fluffy heaps of soft cloud, shimmering in the fragile gold of sunlight, back-lit with the impossible blue of of the open sky. Then as we began to rise higher, the windows in the clouds, gave way to soft terraces of white. I looked out on a vista of cloud-plains, from flat and swirling marshmallow prairies of colour, to mountain ranges across a landscape of gold, white, and blue. “I'm flying to heaven,” I whispered audibly, oblivious as to whether the businessman sitting beside me thought I was a nutter. I barely held back tears.

We descended into Ottawa flying a lazy herd of darker clouds. Across the cloudscape, I could see fork lightning and flash lightning brighten the stone blue of a high rising storm cloud. As we settled into them, the dark clouds contrasted with the fiery red of the afterglow. It was a very different, but equally beautiful, scene. Twice in one evening flight, I'd been privy to such beauty as I've rarely seen.

It was overcast in Ottawa. If I had stayed in town, the longest day of the year would have been a dull and gray affair. Instead it was perhaps the most memorable solstice I can recall. Never assume the worst, I reminded myself yet again.