Saturday fit the role of halfway through summer

No day may lack distinctions but Saturday nevertheless seemed in terms of heat, haze and humidity a middling sort of day that arrived near the very middle of summer.

No Saturday all year comes closer than this one to lying halfway between the June 21 summer solstice and the Sept. 23 autumn equinox.

Saturday fell 45 days after the solstice, with 49 days until the equinox.

On such a day, the thermometer stayed close to the averages. The high temperature in Washington as of 5 p.m. was 87, cooler than average, but only by two degrees.

The morning low of 71 degrees fell only a single degree below the average Aug. 5 low of 72.

Heat, of course, is but one component of a summer’s day here; humidity may not be ignored.

Several parameters may reflect humidity, but people also know it when they feel it. On Saturday it did not seem a major constituent of conditions here. The “feels-like” temperature was only about two or three degrees above the thermometer temperature and did not officially reach 90.

On Saturday, summer seemed to display plenty of the typical summer haze. It tinged the skies with that vague veil of indistinctness that seemed to merge with the clouds, which apparently did not stem from the arrival of smoke from afar.

On a middling day so close to the middle of summer, it exerted a moderating influence. It let the billowing white clouds of summer appear, but without much of the drama or dream they sometimes convey.