Counting the days

Me and my dad, circa 1965.

There used to be a series of television commercials for lemonade (Country Time?) that started up right around now (after Memorial Day, sort of the non-official, official start of summer for a lot of us in the US) and announced how many summer days you had ahead of you to take advantage of the pleasures of summer. They’d update the ad over the course of the summer, like a countdown. I both loved and hated them – loved the glorious reminder/celebration of the small joys, and hated the sense that time was already so limited and slipping away.

Summer is such an interesting challenge – the point is to relax and take it easy and let things happen, but the reality is that if you don’t plan and put the effort into doing certain things then the moment passes and you find yourself in September without having gotten enough sand in your shoes. There seems to be a lot being written in blogland these days about small moments, small pleasures, and I honestly believe it’s a seasonal thing. Even on the other side of the Earth where they are now stepping firmly into winter, I think it still applies – the shoulder seasons of spring/fall are coming to an end and the full seasons (as I think of them) of summer and winter are getting underway. A natural time to pause and take pleasure in the thoughts of how you’ll enjoy the season.

28 new planets. Have you heard this yet? I was thinking this morning that, had a discovery like that been announced – 20 years ago? 50 years ago surely – it would be THE topic of conversation. Everything would just sort of stop as people paused to take this in, to ponder it, to question it, to celebrate it. It would consume the news, the dinner tables, the school rooms. But now the news seems to be falling on a lot of ears that somehow aren’t all that impressed. I find it mind-boggling that 28 new planets have been discovered, and equally mind-boggling that it seems to be a piece of information just floating past on the breeze.