This Ends Happy

Summer Ends

Walking through the garden I pick the oregano, cut some thyme. I dream of a mid-winter pizza with healthy dashes of both, dried and at the ready. I rehash these and other thoughts or get lost in the darting birds and the smell of the rain. I stop by the little apples of camomile, white tips overrun by drops of water, and appreciate them and how they seed and reseed themselves all summer. I think of their sweet scent and their slightly bitter taste. On a sunny day I would pick a flower and chew it before coffee for the sheer pleasure of it. I love a good contradiction.

I then take my kitchen blade to the deep green of the thin yet sturdy celery. This is the celery you do not find in stores because it has way more personality than stalk. It has way more color than water. Then the skies open up, and a quick clip of rosemary is all I can manage, the dog looking on, his spaniel ears drooping like the camomile’s petals. We run a few feet to the warm, dry glow of the house.

Inside I put the herbs and small tomatoes on the counter and into place, filling a big bowl with water to clean them. It feels majestic to have wind in my hair, though I doubt it looks as good as it feels. This hair most likely looks wild and wet but more like the dog’s ears and less like a fashion statement. I feel energized and at the same time peaceful, pushing the strands back into some kind of order. I take inventory of the situation. The beans have been soaking. The onions are in the pot, starting to soften and glisten, their sound inviting in the others. The onions gently embody how God is good, filling the house with savory sweetness.

It is one of the first days of autumn. Tropical storm Ophelia has been canceling plans, drawing our attention to her and to our cold season lives indoors. The first day of Ophelia it poured so constantly that I felt as if I were back in north east Portland, Oregon where gardens and roses grow for much longer seasons than they do here in the mid-Atlantic. I am drawn back to the memory of those roses, how they litter the sidewalks with pink and red, and then how they wash away with the next storm. I think of the roses as the source of confetti. Maybe all the leaves, were once confetti.

Ophelia came with power, but without the harshness of a hurricane. Even when the wind howled that first night, and the water fall changed patterns at a rate and in a style that brought to mind a great garden hose cycling manically through nozzle settings — from mist to shower to flood, to something else, and back again — Ophelia was more of an event than a threat. A tropical storm is more of a dance here than a fall into chaos. A tropical storm here is a rain party, a filling of reservoir coffers without the threat of the roof sailing away.

With some concern for the evergreen that houses the largest contingent of local sparrows, I couldn’t help but appreciate the dance of the weather conditions. Looking out the window, the apple tree and the laurel bush, even the elder swayed at the leaves and along each branch. The bushes sometimes whipped in twirling surges from bottom to top. Ophelia was a frenzy. She kept the dog up, ruffling the blinds and howling at intervals until he howled back. She sent the seagrasses into fits so they resembled a chorus line of high energy singers flinging their enviable hair in time with the beat. The adult plants continued to twist with the wind, while the late-season rapini in the garden waited their turn, still too small to do much more than sway.

I toasted the dinner pot as I poured it some wine, to collect the carmelized bits and to take into the next stage of itself. With hot ginger lemonade, featuring a bit of extra special grappa and honey I clanged the side of the metal. The red peppered sea salt went into the soup and now did all the other players. The power of the sun softens before my eyes. The sparrows sleep and wake and squabble close to the house, shaking off the water that two weeks ago was in short supply.

We settle into the transition, into slicker days and warm drink nights. There are still seven eggplant ripening in the garden. There remain a few weeks of harvest, of sporadic red tomatoes and leafy greens. With the changes in season comes the climate weirdness. Eggplant in September was never a thing around here. Sweater weather is here but not really. This is the new world, and it has a lot in common with the old one. Same planet, different timelines.

Yesterday’s gone but the season lingers in tiny details and in micro harvests. People and places from the last few months are also part of us, memories of good times shining like a tan still golden. The endless summer days get replaced with evenings slowly, surely. The gold converts into a seasonal pale. The salads transform into soups and stews. Tonight’s pot of cooking is softer than a winter meal but not as raw as it was a few weeks ago. It’s bright with fresh, not dried, herbs. The storm passes drop by drop, the harvest ends plant by plant. The daily plan changes meal by meal. Calendars are guides, not decrees. We learn this in so many ways.

The garden, the kitchen, the contrast between wet and dry, long days and lengthening nights — there is a continuity even with all the changes. The sound of the kitchen blade is always new, while the resulting harvest items are almost always familiar. Hello, thyme, my old friend. I admit I listen to the knife as I use it. It tells me, along with my fingers, the fading story of the season. The hot days and heatwaves created a tougher quality in all the herbs this year, so even now in all this deluge, they are more slick than soft.

They say that the harsher the conditions survived, the stronger and therefore more nutritious the plant. They say that those who survive the heat, the winds, they are more vibrant, and sometimes their skins are thicker. We are what we eat. Right now I am half the food I bought in the store, and half the food I grew in the back. I am the summer sun stretching into the soil, warming the roots, and I am the first autumn rain dancing in fits. I am oregano and thyme, and lavender drying in bundles. I am celery seeds too tiny to count, too delicious to ignore, going into a small bottle. I am the summer memories, the season’s warmth, waiting to leap into action again and again.

The calendar will tick into a new year, but the garden will not care for the numbers. It will continue to roll last year’s seeds into the next year’s harvest. It will produce and consume, and consume and produce according to the tilt of the Earth, the availability of heat and light. The calendar will mark the progress of the seeds, but it will not define them completely. We are what we eat. We are the seasons. We are the sizzling, balancing harmony that makes life into art. We are the cutting knife of the harvest and we are the slippery spice of life dancing and twirling in the storms.

The seasons make sure that we remember and that we forget in equal measure. The summer is gone, but never forgotten by our bodies, perhaps even more than our minds. To every season, a fit, a thrash, a bow or curtsy, a long applause. No matter how each performance goes, it leads to the next, so this ends happy.

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I hope you’re having a good transition of the seasons, saying goodbye and welcome in equal measure.

Links for this edition are:

Real Organic Symposium. Virtual Livestream tickets are $40. I just bought mine.

From me to you from the NYTimes - a Tuscan bean soup that really is an easy to build upon or suit to taste recipe. (Do let me know if for some reason you hit a paywall.)

Last but not least, an article, Meet the Climate-Defying Fruits and Vegetables in Your Future, also no paywall. And no comment.

OK, maybe one more: Turtle Seed Co, for anyone who wants some of the best biodynamic seeds and cute but exceedingly useful calendars.

PS. Soon I will be recording audio for each of these posts. Audio will only be available to paid subscribers. All other content will remain the same!