Learning the Bicycle
By Wyatt Prunty

For Heather

The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.

Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she'll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.


Wyatt Prunty, “Learning the Bicycle” from Unarmed and Dangerous. Copyright © 2000 Johns Hopkins University Press. (buy now)

Today is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the winter solstice in the Southern. For those of us in the north, today will be the longest day of the year and tonight will be the shortest night. Although you would think that the Earth would be closest to the sun during the summer, actually we’re about 3 million miles farther away than we are in winter. But our planet is tilted on its axis, and at this time of year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. It is that slight tilt, only 23.5 degrees, that makes the difference between winter and summer.

We consider the summer solstice to be the first official day of summer, but in the ancient world it was celebrated as midsummer and it was thought to be a time when plants had particularly magical properties. Fairies, ghosts, and spirits were thought to be especially active too, and Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects a lot of those traditional beliefs. In modern times Midsummer’s Eve is celebrated sometime between June 21 and June 24. It’s still a major holiday in Scandinavia, Latvia, and other locations in Northern Europe, second only to Christmas. It dates back to pre-Christian times and people take a three-day weekend to dance around maypoles, clean and fill their houses with fresh flowers, and burn straw witches in bonfires to remember the witch burnings of the 16th and 17th centuries.

One of the biggest destinations for the summer solstice is Stonehenge, on England’s Salisbury Plain; it’s the only day of the year the park service offers free parking, free admission, and the opportunity to stay at the monument overnight.

It’s the birthday of guitarist Chet Atkins (Chester Burton Atkins), born outside Luttrell, Tennessee (1924), to a family of fiddlers and singers. He built his own crystal radio set and listened to Merle Travis, with his fingerpicking style, and learned how to play it for himself.

He said, “I didn’t have any idea we were poor. Back then, nobody had any money. We were so poor, and everybody around us was so poor, that it was the ’40s before any of us knew there had been a Depression.”

“Lizzie Bordon took an ax. Gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.” Or did she? On this day in 1893, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, about 50 miles south of Boston. She and the family’s Irish maid were the only other people in the house when Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death, in broad daylight and apparently without attracting the attention of anyone on the busy street outside. Andrew Borden was a wealthy businessman. The townspeople could scarcely believe at first that Lizzie, a hospital board member and Sunday school teacher at the affluent Central Congregational Church, could commit the violent acts. She was seen as such a model of rectitude that the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union called her a Protestant nun.

And yet Lizzie Borden and her sister had a tense relationship with their stepmother and their father was described as miserly. Lizzie had tried to buy poisonous prussic acid the day before the murders at a nearby drugstore. And a close friend saw her take a bloody dress out of a closet and throw it into the coal stove. The case has inspired books, an opera, a ballet, a movie, and, of course, the immortal schoolyard chant. For a close-up look at the crime scene you can rent a room at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast/Museum.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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