Saturday Slight

The sky has been a busy place the past couple of days.  

Blue and white one moment, dark gray with interesting patterns the next, noisy off and on through day and night, exploding with refreshing rain showers two days in a row. 

As noted yesterday, it's been a welcome change, especially the second cleansing of all things dirty and extra moisture in the ground. 

So nice to have squeaky clean scenes and air in August. 

The month is speeding by quickly. With pre-season football games on TV and first-day pictures of kids going to school showing up on Facebook, it seems all too soon that summer will be turning to fall. 

Another hint of one of the major seasonal transitions of the year is unfolding in my kitchen. 

When I'm finished with my blog post, I'll go downstairs and start the second stage of my first batch of jelly for the year. 

Yesterday I threw several bags of berries (raspberries, blueberries and huckleberries) into a kettle and cooked them. 

Today I'll let the juice drip, cook it on the stove with its Sure Jell, lemon juice and sugar, pour it into jars and pray-----that it all sets up.

Making jelly always suggests a feeling of fall, but even with those hints, we know there's some summer yet to happen as more heat is coming this next week to sap our systems. 

Plus, we hope to soon be picking corn and cukes and 'maters. 

It's all part of the seasonal march of life; the trick is to fend off the misery anyway possible so as not to waste the days. 

I read the following piece of wisdom in this morning's New York Times where the writer was lamenting an end to summer.  

It's worth sharing. 

 Another way to stave off the sense of things ending: Make plans. This is the time to book a trip, to fill your calendar with meet-ups and movies, to plant seeds that will blossom when the weather turns colder. 

 “Imagining good things ahead of us makes us feel better in the current moment,” the psychologist Simon A. Rego told The Times. 

Right now, I'm imagining how pretty the jelly will be and how good it's gonna taste.

So, I'm headed downstairs to get at this good thing on a Saturday morning. 

Happy Saturday.