It Felt Like a Miracle. It Really Did.

With mom’s cancer closing in on her, I have to assume that this will be our last holiday season together. I focus on staying in the present. I try to fashion a bit of meaning out of whatever I can.

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A lifetime ago, when the pandemic was new and I was at risk with my asthma, mom was at risk because of her age, and I had two young adults more or less depressed at home, we were hermits. When the 2020 holidays came a-calling, I struggled with how to create any beauty within these confines. But then it occurred to me - there’s multiple millennia worth of meaning in the Winter Solstice – December 21 – when the days begin to lengthen. I followed the urging of my spirit to seek the sun.

Five years later, watching the sunrise on Solstice is a family ritual. We wake at 6am to be in the car by 6:30 to get to the local lookout point at Byxbee Park in Palo Alto which abuts the San Francisco Bay. You walk up a small hill and at its crest you get a view of the Diablo mountain range to your East. On Solstice, when the sun is at its Southernmost point in the sky, the sun peeks over a tiny dip in the Southeastern section of the ridge. I’m still kinda stunned that something so predicted, so expected, is still so surprisingly delightful.

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This year, six of us were slated to watch the sunrise with Mom on Saturday December 21. My son Sawyer put together a few passages on the meaning of Solstice, which we would all take part in reading once we got to the top of the hill. But as the big day neared, rain was forecasted and threatened our plans. I kept scanning my weather app, hopeful for better news. But no luck. Rain would definitely be coming in on Saturday morning.

I felt bereft at the thought of canceling this effort to make meaning for a dying mother. Yet I wasn’t going to drag her and the others out before dawn and have it also be raining, you know?

I was about to give up when the night before, my brother George – a skilled sailboat racer – shared his finely tuned radar data, which said there’d actually be no precipitation in Palo Alto between 7-8am on Saturday morning. Such good news, since sunrise on Solstice is at 7:19am. Could we bank on it? I decided we had to.

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We bundled into two cars. The sky was scattered with clouds but the rain was clearly staying away. We arrived, parked, and took turns pushing mom up the hill in her little red wheelchair. Sawyer handed out seven strips of paper describing the scientific and anthropological meanings attached to Solstice. Everyone read a part. Sawyer went last and connected us to our ancestors huddled around to watch the sun thousands of years ago.

Then we waited for dawn. I played “Here Comes the Sun,” by the Beatles. And when the sun came, it was ablaze and hot with light, and quickly you had to look away to protect your eyes. I felt profound joy at being able to share this wonderment of nature with Mom. We ooohed and aaahed and took a few photos. And because we hadn’t had even a drop of rain, I had forgotten completely about it.

So, I was totally stunned when someone shouted “Look!” and I spun around and saw a full rainbow, doubled in places. But there’s no rain, I thought to myself. I peered about and then saw scattered showers descending from clouds to our West and East. It was like we were atop a tiny island of no precipitation backed by a full rainbow while being roasted in the face by the blazing sun as it roared back to lengthen our days.

I wanted to shout Wait wait everybody, do you see what has happened? Do you realize there is more to this than we know? Do you realize that this full rainbow appearing right as the sun rose, on mom’s last Solstice trek is, SOMETHING???

But then I realized that if you try to make too much of a thing you risk losing the meaning entirely. I just hope that when all is said and done, by which I mean mom is gone, we can all summon this memory of such an improbable and deeply spiritual morning.

xo

🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who knows that ritual is the midwife of belonging.

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