August

Dill Smells like August. I love that connection.
I am canning for the first time. I made apple sauce from the tree that I have written many a love letter from. We are friends from way back, that tree and I.
I then pickelled green beans with as many spices and sprigs of dill as could cram in there. The house heated up and moisture filled the air but Kenny Rodgers and I kept plugging away (Kenny Rodgers is good music for canning, it helps put emotion into the food...if you don't know what I am talking about read "like water for chocolate", you will never cut an onion the same again).

August is the most alluring of the summer months, a dance of trying to pack everything in before the weather turns we have to do our harvesting, swimming, picking berries, preserving food, and trying to find time to rest.
There is a sacred place in August, a place where I feel young. It is watching my mom lift out the steaming jars of jelly from a water bath. Sleeping outside on top of the new stack of hay. It is in the last jump into the the lake. It is in the middle branch on my faithful apple tree where I am writing a letter to someone who will never see it. It is here. It is home.