Darkness comes slowly now, hanging behind the new leaves, waiting patiently in the wake of the summer solstice. It’s as if night is reluctant to disturb the bustle of early summer, respecting the need for extra daylight so birds and animals can nuture their young, so flowers and bushes can burst with bloom, and so the stewards of the earth can tend their young crops.
When do you see the last hint of light before the late June evening finally slips into true, total darkness? On these last days of June are the latest sunsets of the year. By the Fourth of July weekend, sunsets will come a bit sooner each evening.
It’s 10 p.m., and the last bit of murky sky still hangs in the portals of the birch tree’s branches. The sky to the northwest, where the sun slipped below the horizon an hour ago, still has an amber glow. I’ve read that total darkness doesn’t occur until 2 hours after our eyes can no longer detect light in the sky. So that would mean the dark of night, the true darkness, doesn’t surround us until midnight this time of year.
And is that true as dawn approaches, when a soft ripple of light is sent out shortly after 4 a.m., more than an hour before sunrise? If so, true darkness has already lifted. That leaves us with perhaps only 3 or 4 hours of total darkness in the days after the summer solstice, and it explains why birds are chirping before our eyes pick up the first light of dawn.
Though the summer solstice on June 20 this month was the “longest day” in terms of daylight, neither the year’s earliest sunrise nor latest sunset occur on that day. The earliest sunrise is a week earlier, and latest sunset is over the final days of June, when the sun finally slinks away just minutes shy of 9 p.m.
As nights now descend upon us slowly and gently, sending birds to their roost, morning is not far off, beginning with a single chirp of a bird detecting the ripple of a light wave. The first ripple in the waves of long summer days.