For those residing in the Northern Hemisphere, today marks for most the shortest day of the year – the winter solstice.
It wasn’t until spending years in Kalispell up in the corner of Northwest Montana that we as a family really began to appreciate the winter solstice. While cranking away 65-70 hours per week in my practice, as a family we purchased and operated a small horse operation, replete with close to twenty stalls for the boarding operation, a large indoor arena, several smaller barns and out-buildings, and a fair amount of fenced pasture to maintain.
We of course had no fricken’ idea what we were getting into when we dove into this project, and while we worked our asses off for several years, it was a real-time, real-life learning lab for not only my wife and I, but our kids as well – both of whom have gone on to run their own business quite successfully.
One of the things we almost understood from the get go was that there would be an endless array of chores to manage every damn day of the year, something would always be broken and need to be fixed, and that our lives would be inextricably tied to the sun and weather for those years.
Given that I was tethered to an office schedule roughly from 6 to 6 everyday, during the long northern Montana winters I went to work and came home in the dark, and chipped in with the evening chores of course in the dark after I was home.
The shortest days in Kalispell bring with them just over 8 hours of sunlight (sunrise today will be at 0825, with sunset at 445), with many a winter day spent shrouded in clouds with snow and a cold wind blowing.
Despite the inevitable busyness of the holiday season (winter was of course peak horse boarding season as well) we always looked forward to the winter solstice, as minutes of daylight began creeping back into our lives thereafter, up to those glorious days of summer that seemed to last forever, and we could be chasing the evening caddis hatch on the Flathead in the waning light almost ‘till 11.
Here’s to another turn of the solar season, and to longer (and better) sunlit days in 2021.
Image: An almost solstice sunset between Mammoth and Cooke City, YNP.
