Saturdays

Already, it’s December.

Can you recall that day in January when you took a drive to watch the clouds building before a storm? Or the day in April when you walked out the door and noticed the first of the spring flowers blooming? Can you think back to the warm night in July when you sat under the stars listening to crickets in the dark, or the day in early September when the air felt as though you’d woken up to fall?

We mark our lives by calendar days ~ it’s Monday, or it’s the weekend, or Thanksgiving, or a birthday. Time skips easily from one marked day to the next.

But what of all those in-between days?

What of the day when you sat a few extra minutes with a cup of coffee watching the sun dance in lazy patterns across the kitchen table, or the day you heard good news from an old friend, or even the day when you finally cleaned the garage or planted the tomatoes or found something you thought you’d lost?

It seems to me that the in-between days are the ones that should count the most, the ones that change us, little by little, moment by moment. They are the days we pass through on our way to the next dentist’s appointment or graduation or vacation. They’re the days that have been all but forgotten when we suddenly realize it’s December and another year is coming to a close.

Time strolls ahead of us in those days.

Maybe next year I’ll pay more attention to the in-between days. I’ll celebrate the non-celebrations and I’ll think to myself more often, this…THIS day is an exceptional day. And maybe it’s for no other reason than a rainstorm, or that I saw the turkeys wandering up the hill in my backyard, or because made oatmeal cookies, or because my granddaughter and I looked for lizards in the grass, but maybe time will go by a little more slowly if I remember to pay closer attention to those in-between days.