June is my favorite month.

When I taught school, we teachers loved this month as much as our students did. I remember a TV commercial where the final bell of the school year rang and instead of the usual rush of screaming, deliriously happy students bolting through the exit doors, the teachers shouted out loud while they threw their lesson plan books into the air and raced to their cars in the parking lot.The sixth month also brings the summer solstice at 6:34 p.m. on June 20, the longest "day" of the year.I have more reasons to love this month. My anniversary arrives at the end of June and yes, I do remember the date and even the moment I said yes to my beautiful bride 12 years ago. This year, we will be coming home from Disney World on our anniversary after watching our son play in the 11U AAU National Championship Baseball Tournament.We'll be in Disney for Father's Day, too. I will write another column soon about the wonderful gifts my children are to me.My birthday also comes in June. At my age, I try not to count the years anymore. I'm just thankful that I'm healthy enough to not have to make frequent visits to the doctor's office.I don't have any particular birthday memories, but I do remember before I was born.That's right - I have a memory from about the fifth prenatal month when I first started to hear sounds.I certainly cannot recall the moment my mother birthed me, but because of the intuition of my favorite poet who reawakened my instincts, I can recall being inside my mother's womb.In Walt Whitman's poem, "On the Beach at Night Alone," he details a remarkable relationship with humanity and Mother Nature."On the beach at night alone, as the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song … a vast similitude interlocks us all … all identities that have existed or may exist on the globe … shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them."To me, Whitman suggests that we go to the ocean to hear the waves rolling onto the beach because the sound brings us subconsciously back to a place of comfort where we lay in warm water that sloshed back and forth over us in a cocoon that held and "compactly" enclosed us.That place is our mother's womb. In fact, European hospitals began the practice in which a birthing woman is placed into a tub of water so the newborn can make an easier transition from water into water.This idea makes sense to me. It's far better than what happened in the old days when a baby entered our world from his mother's warm belly into a cold room with bright, scary lights. Then the doctor spanked him on his behind to get him to cry so his lungs would breathe in air.Think of the beach and the sounds of the ocean waves. Doctors will tell you it's a sensory experience that relieves stress, especially if you are "on the beach at night alone" when you can't see much of the water, but you can listen to the same slish-slosh sounds you heard in the womb.If you can't get near the real thing, you can buy a machine that can put you to sleep with the sounds of the seashore.No matter what age I reach every year, I can renew my pre-birth day simply by driving to be near the Atlantic Ocean or by walking along a fresh mountain lake on a breezy day.Try this experiment. On a crowded day, while lying on your beach blanket next to people you don't know and all of you are listening to the waves, turn your head to them and say, "Doesn't the sound of the waves make you want to go back into your mother's womb?"It's a win-win. Either you will have a heck of an interesting discussion or you will have more room to stretch out because everyone will have moved their blankets as far away from you as they can.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com.