What is the taste of summer? Is it toast with crabapple jelly, put down by the folks at Smoland Prairie Inn during a year when there were crabapples, when the buds hadn’t been destroyed by hail? Or cheese-curds, squeaky-fresh from the Burnett County Creamery, eaten in a bottomed-out canoe on the shallow St. Croix River? Or peaches, picked yourself, one by careful, is it ripe? one, on a breezy slope in the hill country south of Fredericksburg, as Chinese tourists among the next row of trees look in vain for phone bars? Is it ribs from Arthur Bryant’s place in Kansas City, a place alive with hospitality amid the bleak urban wreck of a neighborhood? Or sweet corn at a brother-in law’s birthday party, while grandma suffers a worrying nosebleed?
It has been all those, for me, tasted in time snatched from two months of frantic “hiring and firing,” of planning for the best but fearing the worst, of going on faith and still going on faith, and still going, and going, and going. Two months of sometimes falling off the steep learning curve of learning to run a school, or rather of applying skills from thirty years of teaching, being on committees, facing down thieves and flat tires on the dark byways of Italy, applying for university monies, accepting the kindness of strangers, working at a newspaper, acting as a stage manager, dreaming up and carrying out trips to far away places, teaching Sunday School, singing in choir, raising children, sitting at the bedsides of ill or dying parents and trying – sometimes in vain – to keep the peace among friends, colleagues, myself and my in-laws… to running a school. And here I am, washed up from that sea of worry on a beach of self-indulgence, and of a different, a family sort of worry.
Just now I tasted summer as it is lived here in the San Francisco Bay area: in the chilly summer fog of the Bay’s industrial rim. While my daughter did her hourlong run around the back streets of El Cerrito, I walked briskly along the trail which leads from the Dog Run to Marina Bay, replicating somewhat my power-walks at Thomas Park, back home in College Station: a bittersweet walk. Yes, it tasted of memories of walking there with my mother, and wishing I had been here to walk with her there more, that perhaps she would be walking there still, had I been able to live near her, to take her out walking as she needed to, after her friend moved away, my father being lame and unwilling to put himself through the painful effort of walking with her, or get a power wheelchair to bring it about. That’s the bitter taste, along with viewing the grim, gritty underpinning to the marshlands along the walkway, lined up in rigidly-straight heaps and laved by straight canals: the silty topsoil covers concrete bones of extinct giants, waste from the liberty-shipyards of the ‘40’s, themselves spawning the urban blight of labor lured here from the South and left to rot after the War, as rot they did.
But over the bones of the waste is growing a comely cover of native grasses and reeds, succulents, wildflowers , all running with muddy rivulets shaped however they like and walked over by marsh-birds and creeping furry critters, a landscape nearing the pristine, in which only the occasional abandoned tire or blown-off bustina mars the nearly human-free scene. The chilly, freshening breeze blows sweet across the wild fennel growing on the margins of the waste, on the edge of the asphalt path; the dilly leaves of the fennel crush sweetly between the fingers, the yellow umbels suddenly shout that they would taste lovely, lightly fried in batter like Roman artichokes, and I laugh at the other, the healing, rich, inward taste of summer: the making of a wholesome dish from the bitter jetsam of memory.
