Spring

The last posts on this blog seem one million miles away: beans, carrots, cucumbers, pickling as a way to deal with excess produce..... now, in April, we haven't harvested a fresh cucumber in months.   The last time we saw the bean plants they were brown, mildewed, frozen and rotten, waiting to get taken down.

In my head I know this happens every year.   Every year, we survive a winter (no matter how mild) where almost everything green turns brown and dies and flowers get destroyed by rain and frost.  If, like me, you have some interest in eating locally, you start in the fall excitedly carving up squash and carrots, roasting potatoes and beets and stretching out your cabbage, proud of your ability to change with the seasons.  It feels right - the weather is cold and I always crave soup and hearty things.

spring thyme and sage next with the garlic today

And then the winter wears on.
I pickle the last of the cukes and peppers, then I eat the pickles.   I start to defrost roasted tomatoes and pry open the stubborn jars of crushed tomatoes I canned.  Sometimes I'll pickle supermarket cucumbers, or make coleslaw out of a purchased cabbage.  And finally, by February or March, it's all gone.  Our cupboard is chock full of potatoes, onions, parsnips and carrots and I can't think of anything I'm more sick of eating.  Meat and potatoes seem like the worst idea, and frozen veggies just look way too cold.

And maybe this is why the miracle of spring hits us (or at least me) so hard every year.   Every year, things slowly come back to life.   Every year, it seems totally life-affirming that the parsley, that earliest plant, pushes its green leaves out of the ground even though its still frosting out (and that it is actually ready in time for the Passover celebration, where it plays a starring role).  Last fall I planted garlic just so I could watch it grow all March and April, before I'm ready to plant anything else.   Every year, I walk around amazed as the trees push out buds, the trees take on a lovely pale-green pastel, and even a cold, rainy day suddenly makes everything look like a Matisse painting.  And it smells different - it smells like earth and living things.  It smells alive.   

Tulips, parsley and sorrel

In 2004, after college, I moved back here from California.   At the time, I couldn't exactly explain why.   I ended a long relationship, I was sick of the part of So Cal where I was living, I missed home.   I'd moved out there partly because I hated the long winters and lack of sun.   But after five years, I realized that I couldn't stomach the new environment.   I hated the long seasons of sunny days - it felt like time had no rhythm, like no time was passing.  And of course, there are rhythms to the desert environment where I was living, but they weren't what I had grown up with.   I needed the seasons as a metronome to my life, a barometer to my moods.    In California, there was no desperate joy of springtime the way there is here, and no gorgeous fall.  It just felt like it  segued straight from summer to Christmas.  

First growth: garlic shoots March 15th, 2012

So, point being, if I wax rhapsodic on the changing of the seasons every year (and in a few years I can go check on my blog and see if that's true), in some ways thats kind of the point.  There's something elemental at work here - something basic and primeval about being human that makes us respond to these changes.   A year is just enough time to forget how you felt about it last year - and to make it all seem new again.   And to remember all the other springs you felt this same way, back as far as you can remember, to when you were a little kid playing with worms and stomping in puddles and making mud pies in March.   I can't stand to cut off those memories.