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IT MAY NOT BE THE EXACT MIDDLE, but I always count it that way--when July begins, we're starting the second half of the year. And there's a phenomenon that occurs, even with smaller increments than a year: when you get to the middle mark, time has a way of taking a big deep breath, kicking up its heels and sprinting toward the finish line!

Let's say that you arise at 6:30 a.m. (Uhm, I'm taking a stab in the dark here...which, to my way of thinking, is what you're doing most of the year when you insist on stumbling from the bed at that ungo- bite my tongue! I won't use that word--at that, ahem, very early hour. At any rate, I'm assuming it may be a common enough setting on the clocks that populate bedside stands.) Now, even for me, who likely ate breakfast when you were nibbling at your mid-morning snack, by two-thirty in the afternoon I'm getting the feeling that the hours of the day already spent were a big, expansive affair and what's left of the afternoon and evening will be a puny little sidekick, sticking around quite briefly.

Or consider a week's worth of days. Doesn't Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all the way up until sometime in the afternoon on Thursday offer a bargain's worth of hours compared to Thursday afternoon through Sunday evening? Why, it's like one of those optical illusions where you can't believe your eyes that both halves of the skewed image are of equal area?

For me, the same holds true in the measurement of a year. It seems like eons ago that I was stashing the Christmas ornaments and listening to Strauss waltzes. But will it seem like eons until the stores are slashing prices on 2010 calendars, giving a big push to get them sold by the last week of the year? Don't you just know that summer vacation will be over in the blink of an eye, and autumn--well, autumn's when the big get-ready-for Christmas hoopla begins.

Interestingly enough (or perhaps in a boring sort of way), I was going to move on to that most macro of time periods--a lifetime--and offer some sort of little profundity on the subject of how time gets warped after one passes the halfway point. But I've thought better of it. I'll just pass along the wisdom of my dad. After middle age, he used to say, it's like catching a ride on greased lightening. So there you have it-- time's a wastin'...I'd better kick up my heels and make the most of today!


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I WAITED UNTIL THE BIG PAINTED RASPBERRY appeared, joining the sign with the big painted blueberry. I even waited until the sign with the big painted strawberry finished its long reign at the neighbors' berry farm and disappeared. After that, a few more days elapsed. Only then did I quit telling myself-- Okay, for sure I'm going to go today and get my jam-making strawberries. That's because by then I was telling myself--See, you procrastinating fool, you waited too long!

Ever since my good friend gave me a little jar of strawberry jam she'd made, and it was such a fabulous shade of red and tasted like a day in June and friendship and love and happiness and many other very good things I could think of if I needed to, I had determined to make some myself.

So I figured it was too late, but I stopped at the farm this afternoon to buy blueberries. Just for eating fresh. I supposed I could make jam with them; it would probably be good. But, hmm, I didn't think it would taste like friendship and love. And then! as it turned out, there were still some sweet little red gems basking in the sunshine. "Yes, you might still be able to find a few," the berry lady neighbor said, handing me a box. "Go all the way out to the rows beside the electric tower. There are some short rows there. Actually, just pick wherever you want, wherever you see any. This will be it for the strawberries."

And that's how, about a half-hour later, I found myself dashing to the store for a pack of Sure-Jell. And soon after that, I was doing this:

Lacking a potato masher, I was crushing the berries with a slotted spoon. And then, fortunately not lacking sugar, I added a small truckload of it to the berries.


Diligently reading the package directions, I stirred the sugar into the berries; then at the stove, I stirred the water into the Sure-jell.



If you're actually watching this stuff, you'll see that I was watching it, too, as I dutifully stirred and timed a minute--Mississippi one, Mississipi two, Mississipi three---getting a little frantic as it threatened to slip the bonds of containment and have a run down the side of the pan.

So stirring--that's what it's all about. As if saying Mississipi sixty times is not enough to make you want to take the state off the map and re-name the river, two steps later you've got to count and stir another three minutes.




Did I really have to do that? (I was feeling a bit rebellious) One glance at the directions, however, and I'm immediately put in my place. DISMAL FAILURE if one strays! Yes, throughout the nine "quick and easy" steps one is warned in no uncertain terms that one must follow each and every step to the letter or suffer dire consequences. Oh, alright, alright.

But then, suddenly I have other worries about the health and safety of my prospective jam. Along about Mississipi one-hundred-and-thirty-seven, a not-lovely creature buzzes by to check out the sticky sweet stuff--hot damn! (I'm sure I heard him say) I've gotta have me some of that! The nerve of him!



I interrrupted my very stirring activity to show you how he actually--actually!--had the audacity to smack his lips and rub his hands, uh...legs? together in anticipation. (Of course, at the time I was forced to let him continue with his fantasies of death by strawberry jam).

So then all I had to do, besides keeping my eye on Freddy Fly (I'm just guessing at his name), was to fill the jars with the would-be jam and tidy up the messy paraphernalia.


Later, (there may be a moral here--be careful what you wish for) I did let Mr. F. Fly take a little sample of the jam that spilled on the counter before giving him my usual admonition in such cases--"breath your last!"--and employing the swatter. I hope he died satisfied, still savoring the taste of a June day and friendship and love and happiness.

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I SET MY ALARM

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I SET MY ALARM SO that I could get up early this morning. I had a pretty important date with The Yard Man (doubles as The Handyman, when he can be coerced into it). The activity that kept us busy this morning involved a stepladder, a dining room chair, two buckets of water and a couple hours' worth of elbow grease. It also involved nearly getting my pinkie fingers pinched off and frequent exclamations of the following type--It's your side that has the smudges! And--I certainly did wash that pane! (which caused one to conjure up a few ways to put the homonym into a sentence!)

This is an old house that we live in, Reader Dear.  In the event you have not been around long enough to have acquired this knowledge, anything that has graced the earth for a century or more (as has our dwelling) takes heaps of maintenance. Old houses get creaky and leaky. They require special equipment to help them cope. Which is why we have to go through the agonies of washing rope-pulley windows and their custom-made leak-protectors (ahem...storm windows, that would be).

Our painstaking job this morning went something like this: Remove window screen; raise two storm window panels to expose the lower window sash on both sides; lower both panels and the lower sash, to expose upper window sash on both sides; lower upper storm panel, raise lower sash and raise lower storm panel to expose upper storm panel on both sides; leave lower sash raised and raise upper storm panel--lower lower storm panel to expose on both sides...yep, worse than you thought, eh?  Can you imagine the coordination all of this takes?


All of these maneuverings allowed the one on the stepladder and the one on the dining room chair to each employ his or her own unique window-washing style--the one who whips out the washing cloth and wipes down the window with dispatch, then grabs the drying cloth and before you can say "fly-dirt on the window" is finished; and the finicky one who is laboriously scrubbing each little corner of the pane and before you can say "you missed a spot there," hears the sound of the ladder rattly-rattling off to the next window.



About mid-morning it felt as though we were scrubbing windows on the Empire State building!Window after window, there were always more. Eventually, however, we wrapped up the job, just in time for what remained of the morning sun to come sparkling through the old wavy glass with the assorted cracks and bubbles. It made me want to dance a jig. Of course, I estimated about fifteen minutes before the little critters that help to undo our work would start moving back into their favorite haunts, and the nitty-gritty of ordinary life would start sticking again. But...hey, Reader Dear, I had a brighter world for at least fifteen minutes...that's still something about which to kick up my heels!


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A BLURB FROM MY SUMMER SOLSTICE
(sorry, you know I do procrastinate)...



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As I'm returning home from a most delightful cookout and evening concert at the park, a neighbor's windmill is spinning and the DJ on the car radio is spinning Vivaldi's "Summer." Here's three-quarters of my very first 9:08 pm of the season, which I spent pulled over onto the shoulder of the road with my camera poked out of the open window.

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IF YOU THOUGHT ABOUT IT at all, you must have assumed that I got to the end of that rabbit trail and fell down the rabbit hole. Since I'm so tardy coming back to my story of the Garden Tour, I'll just say yes--of course that's what happened. I chatted with the Cottontails a while, got them to teach me the hippity-hop, then looked around for Alice (she wasn't there).





Fuzzy tales aside, I'm back in the garden--the one at the historical estate where a gentleman bobbing a bonsai was the one who set me off on the trail.






Ohio sis-in-law and I have wandered off to another part of the grounds and this following photo was taken expressly for her--she wondered about the identification of these blue flowers blooming profusely on the arbor. Of course, she had a camera of her own, and so she got a shot of her own, as well. And I took a shot of her taking a shot of me taking a shot of her taking...ah, the day was getting long and hot. But we had one more garden to see.


You won't see this one, though. I took no photos here; there was simply nothing unique that I wished to remember. The homeowners had torn down an old stone mansion (and old shade, I'm quite convinced) to build their new mansion. The pool was newly installed. The pool house was newly built and equipped with all the amenities for entertaining. The gardens were newly landscaped. But, oh, ho-hum, I needed shade and I lost interest early. Wandering out the elegant and newly paved-with-pebbles driveway to the road, where there remained one towering leafy tree, I slipped off my sandals.

Soon enough, exceedingly warm and ready to call it a day, my three sibs-in-law joined me. So I slipped my sandals on and we crossed the street to the car. But my goodness, my feet had grown so hot and sweaty. So...very...hot and sweaty. They were causing my sandals to cling like a desperate lover. What on earth had happened to my feet?! Egads, I yanked off my sandals to see a sticky mess of tar. It oozed between my toes. It blotched the soles of my feet.

I had one positive thought: thank goodness this was our final garden stop, and not our first. In case you've never encountered this situation, let me tell you there is no quick and ready clean-up for tar-besmirched feet and sandals. One cannot remove the sandals without sullying each spot where one rests one's feet. Goo-gone, the supposed solution to all goopy, gooey problems, does not touch it (I soon learned when, back at local sis-in-law's house, I put it to the test).

Okay, well, there was nothing that I had to do on my way home, other than stopping at the grocery store. I did have to pick up my salad ingredients now--time was of the essence if I wanted to get to the family cook-out (at the home of yet another sis-in-law--[I've got an abundance]). I thwack-thwacked my way through the store, being grateful for the occasional step in which my sandals stuck soundlessly to my feet. I then rushed home, used up my entire supply of nail polish remover, thereby making my feet passably fit to walk a mile in my own shoes (a clean pair, of course). I tossed a salad and tossed out my tar-mucked sandals and headed out the door.

A word of advice: No one's going to get through life without walking through a little...uh...stuff that happens. You should also watch out for tar.

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