Well, I’m in Norway, where the weather is about as predictable as a spastic hamster on a roulette wheel, so you’re better off looking out the window than at your calender to see which season you’re in. It seems to be getting worse, too. Summer starts anywhere from April to July, and frequently buggers off and comes back again at random times. We’ve had the hottest spring in living memory, and then right at the summer solstice, boom, the temperatures took a nosedive. Yeah, you go figure it out.
You also never know whether you’ll have a hot summer, a cold one, a wet one, or one that can’t make up its mind. The winters are no better. You can have a normal one with some snow, then the next year it’ll be mild and rainy with hardly any winter weather at all, and the year after that you’ll be freezing your tits off for six months.
I am happy that the day/night cycle will return to a state of relative sanity in the coming weeks, though. This whole business of going out in the afternoon sunshine, only to look at my watch and realize that it’s midnight, the stores are closed and I should probably be in bed, is starting to get to me.
I don’t really go by the solstice to determine season change. I go by weather and month.
Usually summer (as I define it) starts mid-May, and ends in mid-August. It is usually marked by the weather getting unpleasantly hotter and the leaves finish budding. The end of summer (again, to me) is when the leaves start falling off and the temps start going down.
As a child, summer began with running joyously out of the school building and ended with running joyously back into the school building. June 1 to August 31 still defines summer to me, not the weather or the solstice.
That puts me in line with the US National Weather Service.
Third option, astronomical and/or pagan summer starts on the solstice, but there is also academic summer which depends on your particular school calendar, weather summer which depends on your particular microclimate, and regular calendar summer which is just June July August.
In Tucson we make a big deal of the first day in the year that the temperature reaches 100° F., facetiously known as “Icebreak Day.” This year we reached 100° on May 16. If that ain’t summer, I don’t know what is.
This “Norway” where you are must be a community in northern California. Or else this is a global thing. We’ve had hot clear “summery” weather likewise for some time now. But today, the first day of “official” summer (for certain values of “official”) it’s coolish and overcast. Yeah, go figure.
