"June"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“June”

June 1, 2022

 

“June is bustin’ out all over!

The sheep aren’t sheepish anymore!

All the rams that chase the ewe sheep

Are determined there will be new sheep

And the ewe-sheep aren’t even keepin’ score!

……………………….

On account-a it’s June, June, June

Just because it’s June!”

                                                                                                                                Rodgers and Hammerstein

                                                                                                                                Carousel, 1945

 

Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics were racy, but not even he would have guessed that thirty years later June 2^nd would be recognized as International Sex Workers Day, after over a hundred prostitutes occupied Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon, expressing anger at exploitive working conditions. Sex and love, whether one writes of sheep or humans, are intimately entangled, especially in June. Fittingly, the month is named for Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and fertility. Two of our three children were married in June. (Caroline and I, needing practice, wed in April, to be ready for June.) 

 

As the naturalist and nature writer Jean Hersey wrote in A Sense of the Seasons, “June is the gateway to summer.” It is the baptismal time for the start of summer, the month of graduations and summer vacations. Trees display their canopies of green. Below them, forest creatures search for food and mates. And in gardens, flowers bloom and summer’s produce pokes through the fertilized earth, reaching for sun and rain. On June 21, the sun will be at its highest point in the sky – mid-summer’s day – marking the summer solstice, the longest day in the year. (In 2008, Caroline and I, curtesy of a good friend, were in St. Petersburg, Russia on that date, when the sun rose at 2:00 am and set after midnight.) 

 

History was made in Junes: England’s King John set his seal to the Magna Carta in Runnymede Field on June 15,1215. On June 18, 1815, Allied forces led by the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon’s army at Waterloo. In 1876, on June 25, Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull defeated General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory. Thirty-eight years later, on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of the Austria-Hungary Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, which led to the “guns of August” – the start of World War I. On that same date, five years and 40 million casualties later, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in Paris, ending what had been heralded as “the war to end all wars.” Sadly, that was not to be the case. On June 4, 1944, the Allies liberated Rome, and two days later 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified French coast in Normandy. The Korean War began on June 25, 1950. Medgar Evans was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi on June 12, 1963. Five years later, Senator and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5. In June we celebrate Fathers’ Day, Flag Day, and a favorite, World Sauntering Day.

 

Our youngest child and youngest grandchild were born in June, as were Adam Smith, Nathan Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Maynard Keynes, Lou Gehrig, Cole Porter, Hattie McDaniel, Judy Garland, Anne Frank and George W. Bush. And my father-in-law, were he still alive, would turn 130 on June 25.

 

June is about fresh starts – the first of summer, new jobs for high school and college students and, for many, the chance to say, “I do.” The poem Easter by the American poet Joyce Kilmer, who was killed during the Second Battle of the Marne three months before the Armistice, captures the month:

 

“The air is like a butterfly.

With frail blue wings.

The happy earth looks at the sky

And sings.”