JOY ALONG THE WAY: THE LITTLE DOILIES OF AUGUST

First, there are the fantastic doilies of the garden spiders that spin their delicate, lacy webs in the dark. How do they see? How can they measure so exactly the distance between the threads of the framework? One evening I leave the porch, late, with all the usual adornments in place, the potted flowers watered, the swing cushions fluffed. Next morning as I walk out again, coffee cup in hand, there it is, the great circular orb in a corner between ceiling and porch post, as if some ghost in the night has thought to add a piece of gingerbread trimming. I wish I could find something with which to spray the web to make it permanent, although I'd be defeating the spider's purpose for its production. Such webs never cease to jab my sense of wonder.

Queen Anne's Lace doilies, composed of a lot of little doilies close together so they appear to be one, are still adorning the roadsides and fallow fields, although many of the flat white blossoms are cupping upward and inward into what we call "bird nests." These clipped off "nests," when dried and sprayed with gold or silver make a pretty and sure conversation piece when displayed in a glass bowl.

What started out as spring's most pronounced and perfumed floral "doily," the elderberry blossom, has now become completely transformed into purple fruit, a present for mankind if mankind wants to accept. My sister, Lillian, is the only person I know who had the patience to make elderberry jelly. I understand, too, wine can be made from the elderberries.

Because I have so many of them now, I like to clip off, closely, no stem left, a black-eyed Susan blossom, flatten it out on the table beside my plate and view it as a yellow petaled doily with a little stand-up brown jug in the middle! These make pretty, live, plate-side decorations if company is expected.

Elderberry wine and little brown jugs! Maybe I'm getting drunk on these nature doilies of August.

Let me wax a little philosophical about my subject. Mrs. Wallen, an early neighbor, spent much of her time crocheting small, intricate, fine-threaded doilies just to give away. Most of them were her own original patterns. Folks marveled at her devotion to this project and sometimes -- someone might say, "You'd think she'd find some way to better spend her time," until they heard her say, "Oh, I just love to make something perfect and it just puts a lacy doily on my day to give them away." A lacy doily on her day! What a marvelous way to express a satisfying "happening" in an ordinary day.

Sometimes, when I start a little, or even a large project for a day, I think of Mrs. Wallen and say to myself, "I'm going to make a lacy doily of this. Just like Mrs. W. I'll skip no stitches, make the correct turns, insert the needle properly, keep the tension just right." It might be making a peach cobbler, scrubbing the kitchen floor, keeping the back screen door from banging so loudly, playing a hand at bridge (all my original patterns). It is a good intention and my zodiac sign, Virgo, says such star-influenced people are supposed to be perfectionists. However, I may, unaware, skip a-stitch, make the wrong turn, tighten the tension, i.e., too much sugar in the cobbler, trumping my partner's trick, slumping in attention to the thing under way. But, like Mrs. Spider whose web is many times torn, I can always start to make a new one.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.