Dog days in blogville

Well, Wheylona is off to SanSe and Neds to Roma, so who knows when they'll be back in the bologosphere. I'm for Spokane (hardly as exotic, but there you go) in a few days, leaving most of the heavy lifting to Johnbai and Just Jon for a while. Perhaps, wherevever we are, we'll all be busy celebrating the American working class, and it'll all work out fine.


Labor Day marks by many measures the end of summer (or of the summer holiday season, at any rate); Otis seemed to sense this yesterday. In some strange way, the angle of the sun, the color of the sky, the quality of daylight seemed different to her and she responded in a physical way to the impending change of seasons. All of which got me thinking about our calendrical markings here in the West.

We have two solsticies: summer (~June 21, the longest day) and winter (~Dec. 21, the shortest day). We also have two equinoxes, when the periods of daylight and nighttime are equal (vernal ~Mar. 21, and autumnal ~Sep. 21). The seasons are traditionally thought to change on these dates.

But did you know that there are also four half-way markers in many pagan traditions -- days that mark halfway on the journey from solstice to equinox, or from equinox to solstice? These are called the cross-quarter days, and are denominated in Celtic tradition Samhain (the middle of fall), Imbolc (the middle of winter), Beltane (the middle of spring), and Lughnasdh (the middle of summer). The first three have related modern holidays that fall close to or at the cross-quarter moment: Halloween, Groundhog's Day (or Candlemas), and May Day. The summer cross-quarter holiday has not survived in any modern form, except perhaps for the archaic feast of Lammas ("Loaf Mass"), a Xtianization of an ancient pagan festival.

This kind of marking of the cycle of the year always reminds me of my favorite riddle:

How far can a dog run into the woods?
Only halfway, because after that he is running out.

So maybe that's what Otis was feeling yesterday, even though it was technically a couple of weeks late - her senses told her that we are no longer running into the warm verdant woods of summer, but that we have reached the middle, and are running out.