The longest day of the year arrives not with a countdown, not with pomp and fanfare, but in increments, 182 two-minute steps. Beginning in the dense darkness of December, the light tiptoes a little further into each afternoon and, despite its notation on every calendar I own, the summer solstice – like an old cat or an impish toddler – sneaks up on me. It creeps gingerly through the afternoon until one day I realize it is eight o’clock and the sun is still dangling only halfway down the sky.

This year’s solstice fell on Sunday, the Sunday of Father’s Day.

Baseball kept me distracted for a while, distracted from the paternal tributes – both funny and poignant, brief and epic – on social media, tributes I knew would leave me tender, longing for the father for whom I had never had any difficulty composing paeans of admiration and gratitude, aching for one more conversation. Once the final out was made, though, I had to find something else to which I could direct my attention.

It had been raining earlier. The air was still thick with hot moisture and the grass, not quite in need of cutting, was holding the leftover rain like a sponge forgotten in the bottom of the sink.

It was not clear whether the road was walkable, but Owen and I crossed the yard to find out.

Stepping into a road neither soggy nor slick, I saw the sun, pulsing in the northwest corner of the sky through a ragged tear in what was left of the rain clouds. It was not necessarily pushing its way through, but coaxing the clouds to step aside, making sure that those of us clinging to this tilting sphere, this "pale blue dot” would not be robbed of a single moment of luminosity.

Owen ran ahead and I had taken only a handful of steps before I was dispatched back into childhood, the cloying humidity becoming a bullet train into the past. I could feel my upper lip curving under my teeth as the lower one pushed forward, a deep breath expelling itself into the afternoon in a useless attempt to repel gnats.

I could feel my bare feet, grown oblivious to rocks and sandspurs, press into the graininess of the dirt with which we would bake pies and build toad-frog houses. I could taste the Kool-Aid and the daisy-shaped butter cookies with the hole in the center. I was 10 again and every day was the summer solstice.

I didn’t even know the word oblivious and yet I was. I woke every morning with sunlight fading the Paris Pink walls of my little girl bedroom into the color of a vanilla ice cream cone and fell asleep every night to the sound of a box fan moving air through an open window and a million crickets making music with their wings and spent the hours in-between gulping in what was the very best part of life, ignorant and unaware.

Which is, of course, the very best part of childhood – better than cajoling truck drivers to blow their horns, better than playing freeze tag in the front yard, better than cartoons and paper dolls and marbles. Being asleep to things like clocks and bank accounts is being awake to the best things, the real things, the things that become memories to be stirred up on the longest day of the year.

Owen and I didn’t walk far, half a mile or so before turning around and heading away from the stubborn sun which was finally, reluctantly, grudgingly releasing itself to the gravity of the horizon.