On Friday we in the District met the solstice, and for all of us, even for those who suspected that the warm weather season had already started, it is finally and astronomically summer.
To judge a season from a single example, to draw inferences from a single day, without thought of the future or recourse to the past, seems a dangerous practice.
But based on Friday and only Friday, with its manifold pleasures, and fairly wonderful weather, summer in D.C. seemed, without distortion or exaggeration, to be a splendid season.
Friday suggested a day that might be placed on some meteorological loop, and repeated almost endlessly before it caused ennui or weariness. The day of the summer solstice seemed a day of days.
The actual moment of the solstice, and there is one, the infinitesimal point in time when in the figurative sense the sun halts its months-long northward journey, when it stops rising ever higher in our skies, and begins to head south, came for us at 10:42 p.m.
But on Friday afternoon, Washington was less than 12 hours from that moment of astronomical record, a scarcely discernible difference.
It was the solstice alone that made Friday exceptional, and a calendar landmark. But Friday seemed distinctive in other ways.
In its temperature, Friday was a perfectly average early summer day. The official high temperature was 87 degrees; that is the average high temperature in Washington for Friday's date.
It is said that summer is soon to inflict upon Washington, and on much of the rest of the country as well, some days of great heat, a taste of seasonal torment, a test of thermal fortitude.
But sufficient, as the saying goes, unto those days the heat and miseries thereof. For Washington, Friday was on hand to be enjoyed.
The 86-degree reading itself could be welcomed merely for its lack of harshness. But in addition, those were 86 fairly dry and comfortable degrees. Humidity received short shrift in the city on the day spring turned to summer.
Subjectivity is one thing. But the dew points cannot be readily denied. They resided in the upper 50s and lower 60s. A bit above the low range perhaps. But by no means high and perhaps even a little below the moderate range.
If at times the early summer air seemed in need of a bit of stirring, the west wind blew. At least once, it reached 16 mph, and at least once, it gusted to 26 mph.
Only occasionally covered by a passing cloud, the sun attained its maximum brilliance. It was after all the day of the solstice. In Northern Hemisphere skies, the sun reaches its zenith on the day of the solstice, and shines with a strength that it possesses only at this time.
Trees and branches, leaves and twigs, lawns and streets seemed bathed in a flood of brightness that exceeded year-round experience.
In sunshine or in shade, the day remained pleasant, with flocks of fleecy clouds moving with the summer breeze across a sky of deep and unsullied summertime blue.
From sunrise at 5:42 a.m. until sunset at 8:36 p.m. Washington received its maximum annual allotment of 14 hours 54 minutes of daylight and from the standpoint of meteorology and on the basis of the city's weather history it seemed difficult to find flaws or fault.