The Firefly Moon is waxing it calls out the fireflies when the grass is moist in the night and the humidity is high and thick. As the moon waxes, it draws a vast high-pressure system down from the northwest, sometimes chilling the last days of June, offering cool but deceptive respite before the Dog Days of July and then inciting the turbulence of the Corn Tassel Rains that lodge the uncut wheat fields and turn the new corn lush and fertile.
By the end of the week, the longest days grow shorter by just a minute or two. But normal temperatures continue to climb almost all the way through middle summer, defying the prophesies of the growing night. The sun, in Cancer for weeks to come, rides way up on the ecliptic, and the Dog Star Sirius, following Orion below the sun, burns through the shining day-sky due south in the cruelest hours of the afternoon.
When the Firefly Moon grows gibbous in its second quarter, enchanter’s nightshade puts out magical flowers in the dark of the woods, and pale touch-me-nots, their leaves soft and seductive, blossom beside the rivers’ waving lizard’s tail in the rivulets of the wetlands.
Drawn to flower by the power of Cancer’s center star cluster, called the Beehive, bee-balm seduces all the bees of the fields, and black-eyed Susans take the roadsides from the daisies of May and June.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for second week of middle summer. In the meantime, look for nighttime fireflies and hunt for bees in the bee-balm.
