“Your everlasting summer you can see it fading fast / So you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last.”

— Steely Dan, “Reeling in the Years”, 1972

My wife and I have been doing a bit of salsa recently. I mean the sauce, not the dance. Her new titanium knee is much better than her original one, but not to the point where she’s ready to sashay to the beat of a peppery Latin tune.

Turning our homegrown tomatoes, peppers and onions into salsa is a way to preserve a smidgen of summertime. In my imagination, we’ll open a jar of salsa on a subzero winter day, drag a crispy corn chip through the rich, red sauce, pop it into our mouths and say, “Ah, yes! I detect clear notes of warm August sunshine along with subtle undertones of the two inches of rain that fell the weekend after the Fourth of July.”

Ok, so our palates aren’t quite that sensitive. But you get the idea. It’s not about the salsa; it’s about preserving a sumptuous splash of summertime in mason jars.

In addition to tomatoes and onions, our garden is home to a few bell and banana pepper plants. The fruit of those varieties of peppers contain hardly any Scoville units, so you can eat them like an apple. That is, if you don’t mind getting a ton of annoying little white seeds stuck between your teeth.

I transplanted a pair of greenhouse banana pepper plants in early May. At first it looked as though they were both going to give up their ghosts. But the puny plants mounted a mighty rally, and we currently have enough banana peppers to feed a herd of monkeys.

One diminutive pepper plant — I forget what kind it was — produced an abundance of tiny, bright-red fruit. I picked one of the piddly peppers and took a molecule-sized nibble from its pointy end.

I instantly regretted it. I should have taken heed of the blaring “Warning! This thing can melt steel” sign that the pepper was telegraphing via its intense scarlet color. That pintsized pepper packed enough wallop to fuel a nuclear power plant for an entire year. It was quite a while before the burning subsided. My lips and tongue remained numb for several hours.

Later that evening, I stupidly and absentmindedly rubbed my eyes. The affected sockets instantly began to burn as if they had been jabbed by a red-hot poker. I had to run in circles for several long minutes before the effects of that evil little pepper finally wore off.

Needless to say, we didn’t include any of those powerhouse peppers in our salsa. We instead relied on a packet of salsa spices that were labeled as “medium.”

I don’t know about you, but when I encounter something that’s described as “medium,” I think of it as being safe and middle-of-the-road. Ho-hum, even. The issue here is that someone, somewhere, had to decide what “medium” means regarding that particular blend of salsa spices.

We here in the North are, generally speaking, not known to be spice devotees. For many of us, ketchup is as hot as we are willing to go. If we’re feeling daring, we may venture as far as putting a translucent smear of yellow mustard on our hotdogs.

The other day, my wife and I decided to preserve some of this summer by whipping up a batch of salsa. We started the process by blanching and skinning several pounds of homegrown tomatoes. The ‘maters were chopped and thrown into a kettle along with a splash of vinegar, a minced onion, and a couple of diced banana peppers. The final ingredient that was tossed into the pot was a packet of premixed salsa spices. Spices that were purported to be “medium.”

The resulting salsa looked extremely tempting and smelled as though it was simply begging to be scooped up by some fresh corn chips. But when I took a taste of the concoction, I discovered that it was hot enough to make me prance around the kitchen. This is just a theory, but maybe that’s how salsa dancing got its name.

So, we now have several jars of salsa that’s hot enough to burn through concrete. If it wasn’t quite so spicy, I could use the stuff to melt ice off the sidewalk next winter.

Or maybe we’ll blend it with some ketchup and give our meatloaf a little extra kick. Perhaps we’ll even kick up our heels with a bit of salsa dancing as we recall the heat — both chemical and atmospheric — that we enjoyed this summer.

— Jerry’s book, “Dear County Agent Guy” can be found at www.workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.