June is a love song, sweetly sung.

June is in what the Algonquins once thought of as the full strawberry moon, while in Europe it was the rose moon.  In astrology, it is the Gemini, the twins, two bodies because the first one lies in spring while the second one lies in summer.

June is a love song, sweetly sung, as the Carousel song has it.  You can see it in the trees, you can smell it in the breeze.  Even old timers can recall the Junes of their youth, that feeling of being freed from the tedium of school to embark on summer jobs, summer adventures, and summer romances.

It is a time for clarity, this early summer feeling before the sultry, sticky, dusty dog days come around.  Now is the time for beach music and surfing safaris, girls in their summer dresses wearing bikinis underneath.  If you're old enough, it is still Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy's In Love,"  Bing Crosby singing "Blue Skies."  Never saw the sun shining so bright.  Never saw things going so right.

The tarot card associated with the month is the sun card with the twins on it, according to some schools of thought.  Sallie Nichols, in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, gives it a fittingly June-like Jungian interpretation.  Some say the twins represent Adam and Eve in an Eden where it is always June.

June conjures up the sweet smells of new-mown timothy hay and alfalfa, at least to former farm lads.  There are strawberries galore.  Our entire garden looks beautiful and still perfect (later the deer and raccoons will raid it as they do every year, when it starts to look good to them).  But this is always a time of honeymoon optimism.

If more marriages take place in June, it follows that more honeymoons take place at this time.  You might say that June itself is the marriage between spring and summer, a sweet honeymoon lasting no longer than thirty days.

A time for picnics and cookouts, and walks in the sweet evening air.  We itch to get out of the house, and so it is the worst time for sitting still, the worst time for reading and posting thoughts on the internet.

Nonetheless, I've read a great many more wonderful books than I've had time to write about in the first five months of the year.  I intend to finally sit down at night and review them here, this month.  My stack of books to be reviewed may just be high enough to block out the moon.