One More Solstice

 

     As I sit quietly in my country estate, not a ripple appears on the surface of my coffee. Only the sound of the occasional truck hauling pulp on the county road disturbs the quiet. That and the ice maker dropping another cube into the bin. I have to remind myself we're all sitting on a globe spinning west to east at 1,038 miles per hour. That figure sounds right because the earth is almost 25,000 miles around and it takes 24 hours to get back where it started.

  Meanwhile the earth is orbiting the sun at 67,100 mph. It's a journey of 584 million miles. It takes 8,765 hours to complete the circuit, or roughly 365 days. Our solar system is also orbiting the center of the Milky Way at 447,000 mph. Finally everything in the universe is getting further apart from everything else, but we don't notice that either. What we do notice is the movement of the sun across the sky and the weather. The spinning of the earth brings sunrises and sunsets. We won't see them though if the weather has pulled a blanket of clouds over the landscape.

  As the constellations change overhead I notice the change in the ambient temperature. The tilt of the earth is what turns the heat up and down. When the temperature drops, the rain which would have run into the river, now piles up in the form of snow and causes extra work. Yesterday, December 21st, at around 9:30 p.m., the earth began tilting back towards the sun. The days are getting longer. The sun beats down more directly, warming the ambience and clearing away the snow.

  Yesterday we had 8 hours and 16 minutes of daylight. It will take until Monday before we get another whole minute. The problem for this slow increase is that though the sun is going down later every day, it keeps coming up later until January 6, when the sun finally starts coming up earlier and we're on our way to the next solstice in June when we'll have a glorious 16 hours and 8 minutes of daylight to celebrate Teresa's birthday.

  I've wondered why the sun keeps coming up later for several days after the solstice. Even the dumbed down explanation on the internet is complicated.  I prefer to imagine the earth as a car on a frozen lake, drifting around a central point at 67,100 mph. There will be slippage.

Earth overtakes Venus at the solstice.