A friend of mine, Domenica Marchatti, wrote that she hated to see mums at the supermarket. Aside from the confusion of several readers who thought that she had something against British mothers, I knew immediately what she meant. The smell of apples ripening as I biked past the local orchards was always tinged with dread. Apples mean Autumn, which means Winter. It’s not like I don’t love each season (even mud season, if you can believe it), it’s just that I never want summer to end.
So, thinking it over, the sight of asparagus in the spring, is always a good thing. It means the Earth finally decided that winter was really over. That I never minded. It’s when asparagus season ends that the trouble begins.
First, looking at the fields, you wonder when all the undergrowth had a chance to fill in. And the corn, which starts off as low as an elephant’s toe, is a promise I am in no hurry to see fulfilled. Cucumbers, beets, peas–all these are fine because they are June, early July crops and the summer is still ahead of us, mostly.
It’s when the corn comes in at its peak that the trouble starts. Not the first ears of July 4th, but the full, fat, sweet ears of August. The ones you don’t need anything on, they are so sweet. The ones you eat with juicy tomato salads, sprinkled with the basil that threatens to dwarf your pine trees. The ones that, suddenly, taper off because the heat wave of August is over and it’s warm and wonderful and smells like childhood and ripening apples. Those ears, the ears that mean that the perfect days of early September will shade into the early darkness of October and the terrible terrible desolation of November. If I ever jump off a bridge, you can be sure it will be in November.
It takes a snowstorm or two in December, and the growing light of January and then February to reconcile me to winter, with long-cooked stews and woodsmoke and the mixed joy of snowblowing.
Time marches on at the rate of one second per second. You just have to claw at the good seconds to hold on to them as much as you need to release the bad seconds so they rush by.
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I can so relate to the bittersweet feelings about time’s relentless marching on, everything you look forward to and savor also means that it is here and about to be gone. I like how you mark the seasons with foods in their respective context, lovely and so poignant. And there are some good foods that we can look forward to in every season, but summer’s generous bounty when everything is fresh is the best!