Today is Father’s Day in the US. I am ambivalent about both Sundays dedicated to our immediate forebears. I sometimes buy my mom little things for her garden or kitchen. I write my dad long emails which is his favorite mode of communication these days. I don’t buy greeting cards or gifts and don’t expect the same from my own kids. I do ask for help with tasks in the garden on Mother’s Day. That’s as sufficient a salutation of my status as mom as I require. I certainly don’t want junk to be bought as empty recognition of being a parent or having a parent.
But I could celebrate these days with little psychological stress. That is not true of, perhaps, the majority of people in this country, and I feel that having a day that emphasizes our broken relationships with each other is of dubious value. Especially as we tend to celebrate it with buying crap, eating crap, and making obligatory crap conversation, usually mediated and rushed. It is all a load of crap. But these two days can be outright damaging to those who are still in recovery from childhood or who are dealing with the loss of a child.
I would see us build constant daily relationships with those who love us, regardless of biological connections. There may well be a regular exchange of gifting, but it would be more in line with need. What does your father-figure need today? What would make him smile? How many mothers do you have? How many children? What spreads the most joy to all those people?
I don’t think the ‘institutions’ of motherhood or fatherhood need any particular day of recognition, especially as what we have today is focused on the purely biological definition of parenthood and not on actually caring for a young person and bringing that person to whole and healthy maturity. But it seems silly to have a Mother’s or Father’s Day. We might as well have a Human Being Day. Being a mother or a father to someone — human or otherwise — is one of the central points to being alive, after all. If we have to set aside a day to validate being a person who nurtures future generations by handing out cheap tokens of our esteem, then maybe we need to work on human priorities…
OK that’s a given, but I still think these two days are stupid.
Today the Flower Moon went dark at 12:37am. Seems like a very short moon cycle to me. Even as late as the moons are relative to the civic, quasi-solar calendar this year, we in Central Vermont haven’t yet seen much of a Flower Moon. We had snow at the beginning of this moon cycle and those flowers that were in bloom, mainly trees and shrubs, were blighted by the frost. I’ve only seen the first of the roses in the last couple days. Across the street, the rhododendrons are just now blooming. Those bawdy pink blossoms are normally blown by Mother’s Day, not coming into full flower on Father’s Day.
This is a wet close to the month. We’ve had rain every day for the last week. These rains have been real also, not the feeble mist (and snow) of April and May, some falling in brief torrents, some in soft showers that last all day long. It has not been very windy or hot either. So the ground has stayed moist. This has made for rather rapid germination of all the seeds I planted last weekend, which is a good thing considering how late I was planting the beans and winter squash.
Some call the full moon that falls anywhere in June the Strawberry Moon, even here in New England. That appellation was even less applicable than my Moon of the Flowers this year. The moon was full on June 3rd. There were some indications that strawberries might soon happen in my garden, but no actual berries. Not even in the grocery store. I have noticed a substantial drop in shipped fruit since both the pandemic and moving to locally-focused Vermont. I don’t know if this is a permanent state, but it is certainly a trend. Before 2019, it was not uncommon to have plastic tubs of strawberries trucked in from California in time for Valentine’s Day, and strawberry shortcake was de rigueur for Mother’s Day brunch according to all the glossy magazines in market check-out lanes. But then nationwide refrigerated trucking dropped to nothing in 2020, and it still hasn’t come back to Vermont. So this year, there have been some tubs of berries from farms down in the warmer Champlain Valley, but not many during this moon cycle. It’s certainly not been a Strawberry Moon.
In my calendar, the Strawberry Moon is a new crescent tomorrow, and, indeed, I’ll probably see most of my berry harvest in the next four weeks. I have huge green berries that are just starting to blush. Some might be red by the end of this week. Farmers around here are also saying that their strawberries will be at the markets before June is over, even with the dry and frosty weather we had in May. So this is definitely a more appropriate Strawberry Moon for my part of the world.
Despite it being the tail end of the Flower Moon, the perennial flower garden is only now coming into its own. The penstemons, dianthus, coreopsis and yarrow are all blooming. The iris and poppies are huge and bright, and the outrageously orange and yellow daylilies are just shy of opening. Columbine, bluebells, spiderwort and jacob’s ladder are brightening the shadier spots. There will be bouquets of St John’s Wort in time for Midsummer’s Day. Perhaps even some evening primrose, though no monarda yet. Most of the herbs are either in bloom or budding. Speedwell is sending up purple and pink wands on the front bank. Sweet cicely is making sweet-smelling white lace under the clothes-line. There will be a profusion of lavender very soon. And the roses are sending out streams of scent.
I grow old roses — rugosas, dog roses, apothecary’s rose. Most are single blossoms and somewhat small in bloom size, but they are all highly scented. And most have large showy hips that make fantastic tea and jelly… but that’s later. For now I have blossoms all around the yard, so there will be roses for Midsummer as well. I feel the summer solstice is just wrong without scented flowers. What would the faeries do on a bloom-less Midsummer’s Eve?
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 
I agree. Fathers Day is challenging here for us too, my dad is alive and well and awesome but my kids’ biological father died last year a couple days before Father’s Day. It’s a heavy week. I think these days do more harm than good anymore.
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