It has been a very damp, chilly, gray spring here in Ashland, much damper and chillier and grayer than I am used to. In the San Francisco Bay, where I spent most of my life, the green is so explosive by this time, and there are so many freesias to smell and mushrooms to pick, and the leaves are already so thick on the trees, that one hardly notices the dampness and grayness – at least, I never did. March in the East Bay is the season of wild onions and Indian lettuce, all the tender delicious salad things that die back in May and stay stubbornly dead until revived by the rains of the new year. But here, deracinated from both the comparatively balmy weather of the Bay and the abiding interest of seasonal change in our little patch of forest – that is, here in a small town where it sleets in March – I find that the last many weeks have primarily been the season of wishing it would hurry up and get to be late April already, or better yet early June.
We visited the Bay last week, and I felt envious. The fig tree belonging to a dear friend in Oakland is already peppered with tough little green figlets; the fig tree in our backyard, by contrast, still looks more or less like a large decorative stick someone stuck in a corner. I have seen plenty of Indian lettuce here (it doesn’t seem to mind the late-falling snow) but I can only find it springing up along fences that are visited daily by neighborhood dogs, so I have only admired it at a distance. There are no wild onions; perhaps the climate is too rough for them. And there aren’t any freesias. Freesias are my favorite of the bulb flowers; they have the most wonderful delicate smell, like green tea and starry jasmine, but they’re not cold-hardy like daffodils and crocuses, those cheerful sturdy harbingers of spring, and so instead we have tulips, which I dislike. Tulips are as close as you can get to artificial flowers without actually planting plastic plants. I know they have a marvelously romantic and ridiculous backstory, and people died and princes were ruined for them and so on, but when I look at them in their prim blobby rows all I can think is how extremely easy it is for people to destroy themselves and each other over something really incredibly silly.
I think a lot about human foolishness in springtime, both because it’s the giddiest and bounciest of all the seasons and also because it is harder to ignore my connection to the unshakeable much-larger-than-human cycles of rebirth and renewal after hardship and death when there are goldfinches twittering in the naked branches and cherry blossoms like pink clouds against the gray sky and plants I thought for sure were dead as doornails start suddenly shooting up green leaves from what appear to be perfectly rotten clumps of decomposing root. This sudden recurring surge of life is so obviously vast and interconnected that it makes me feel my purely human preoccupations are vanishingly small by comparison. Spring tugs at all beings.
I don’t think it’s at all coincidental that so many important religious festivals come in spring. I think spring is inherently a mystic time, even more than the harvest is, since after all the harvest takes a certain amount of labor, whereas in spring things just happen. Life shoots up like a fountain. Something stirs in the bones, the sap runs, and the startling aliveness of the world is ineluctably everywhere.
I think I only felt this in a vague and theoretical way when I was young, since springtime in the Bay is a lot more like the rest of the year than it is in climates where things really die in wintertime. I went to college in Massachusetts, which might have served as useful contrast, but in March everything was still frozen and slushy and awful, and I was generally too crazed with lack of fresh air and Vitamin D to appreciate the niceties of the symbolism when the trees finally deigned to flower in early May. In fact my education in the power of springtime didn’t come until I was about 21, when I met my then-boyfriend’s Catholic family for the first time. The boyfriend, who was poetical, had broken with tradition and become an agnostic, but I, being young and very eager to impress his family, insisted on going to church with them for Easter mass.
The whole Easter business appealed to me in the same way the whole Christmas business has always appealed to me, as a set of bizarre and elaborate rituals which everyone treats as if they were perfectly normal and universally legible. Jews also have their own special clothes and foods and songs and so on for the sacred festivals, but they’re all worn and eaten and sung for specific symbolic reasons, and the elucidation of their significance is part of the ritual itself. Donning fancy clothes and putting an egg on the table at Pesach is understood to be somewhat odd behavior, and so the Seder exists in part to explain to the children what the hell is going on. In contrast, the Christian custom of wearing enormous flowered hats and serving baked ham, which seems to me to be a pageantry of equal cultural specificity, is never acknowledged as anything but perfectly normal behavior. The airy assumption in Christian homes is that surely everyone knows it’s acceptable to bring scalloped potatoes as a side dish to Easter dinner and not, say, Ethiopian lentil stew.
This casual cultural complacency made it very easy for me to camouflage myself, because all I had to do was smile politely and not ask any questions. Perhaps the genius of white Christian society is that it is relatively easy to sink without trace into a culture whose rituals seem to consist primarily of eating mashed potatoes and reciting stock phrases like “Isn’t this nice!” at duly spaced intervals, whereas a certain amount of concentrated bodily effort and active dedication is required for true assimilation into a culture whose rituals involve, say, long hours of dancing and lots of hot peppers, or one in which everyone argues constantly about every word of the sacred texts and fries absolutely everything in chicken fat. Anyway, all I had to do was buy a white eyelet lace dress and clasp my hands a little, and my boyfriend’s mother accepted me instantly as a nice well-bred girl of the sort who goes to church with her potential in-laws. I don’t think she ever once suspected me of being what I was, which was an arrogant little pagan Jewish sex maniac. I went to church, therefore, with the smug feeling of a cuckoo who has successfully deposited her eggs in a another bird’s nest. I knew perfectly well that the blithely accepting mother in question would have to spend many long hours in primal scream therapy before she felt so entirely at ease among my family’s typical spring festivities, and this gave me the pleasing sensation of being a wolf in among the sheep.
I sat on the hard bench (so wholly un-Jewish, really, this constant association in Christian thought of spiritual practice with bodily discomfort…) and looked out the windows at the green leaves just beginning on the trees, and listened to the pastor or whatever he’s called talk about joy and resurrection and Jesus. And all of a sudden – it was rather like coming up on acid – I felt a great swelling glorious glow of recognition: all this stuff about return and rebirth just meant springtime! It occurred to me, viscerally and luminously as it never had before, that the miracle of the resurrection of Christ, nodded over in what seemed to me to be very mild and dutiful fashion by the churchgoers around me, was in fact the wild potent miracle of spring itself, the everlasting return of life from the land of the dead, vaster and more eternal than any human life.
I felt perfectly happy and utterly filled with joy. When we all had to turn to each other and shake hands and say “Peace be with you,” I had tears of sincerity in my eyes that delighted my boyfriend’s mother and rather alarmed my boyfriend, who had broken with his parents over religion and was not at all happy about my insistence on going to church in the first place. I left the service with a pure and rather insufferably smug gladness in my heart, sure that I had had a more genuinely religious experience than any of the supposedly devout people around me. I think I can be excused this smugness on the grounds of being 21 and therefore thinking myself spiritually superior to every adult I encountered, which is the natural habit of the young – but the church was, to be fair, filled with the kind of wealthy white New Englanders who do things like throw annual Jimmy Buffett parties, paint dainty watercolors of the coast of Maine, and express polite dismay about the prevalence of marijuana usage, so I may well have been right. My boyfriend’s mother fretted all afternoon because the service had talked about Jesus being hung from a tree, and she kept worrying because it hadn’t said “cross” nearly as much as it had said “tree” and wasn’t the cross the whole point? It was no good trying to explain that this was what is known as metaphorical language; she was not someone who read poetry for pleasure.
The boyfriend turned out to be no good, but that strange experience in the church remains with me. It was the first time I understood that spring means something, my first inkling that spring itself is so profound that symbolism just naturally pours from it, the way fruit spills from cornucopias in old engravings. When I was younger I thought the symbolism was assigned to it was a matter of theory, because what I called “winter” was a time of rains and fogs and lush grass growing, of the hills coming almost aggressively back to life after the long dry summer, and spring was just another season of growth, not the return of Persephone from the icy grip of Hades. True winter, with its cold touch of death, was a thing in books, only an idea; and so spring was also only an idea.
They were ideas I found very beautiful and compelling, however. Like many children, the idea of places with four tidy seasons seemed very magical to me. A lot of children’s literature deals with seasonal specificity and seasonal joys, perhaps because when you are very young, a season is a whole lifetime, and you have to be helped to make the most of it. Many of my favorite books, from Beatrix Potter to Calvin & Hobbes, gave lavish glimpses of the delights to be tasted by a child or small animal in seasons of which I knew not: frosty autumn with its piles of leaves, winter with its hoarfrost and sledding. (Think of the beautiful snowscapes in The Mitten, or the hot summer streets of Cherries & Cherry Pits, or the delights of foraging in Blueberries for Sal, or…)
An obsession with Christmas was dominant in my early love of seasonality, and in fact I have come to believe that the iconography of Christmas is so compelling and contagious even among the determinedly non-Christian in part because it has managed to become in many ways the seasoniest of all Western holidays. It positively glories in its time of year. It is piled and draped with the signifiers of its season. Hannukah, by contrast, is a holiday imported from a desert country, and it has no particular winteriness attached to it. Although the lovely symbol of lights enduring in darkness is appropriate for its proximity to the winter solstice, this is in fact merely by happenstance; it marks a historical event that might as well have taken place in July.
Of course Christmas is also essentially the marking of a historical event in a desert land that could well have happened at midsummer (although it does occasionally snow in Bethlehem), but it borrowed the beautiful winter solstice symbolism so intensely and aggressively from the pagans, largely in order to convert them, that it is easy for everyone in the northern hemisphere to forget that it ever consisted of anything else. The blazing fire in the hearth, the smoking chestnuts (which are, notably, one of the few fully seasonal foods we have left), the snowy pine boughs, the mulled wine, the roast beast, the striped mufflers…depictions of Christmas without these things are simply not satisfying, or at least they weren’t to me, or to most of the people I know and like, either. What is enjoyable about Christmas is its determined glow of warm friendly jollity in wintertime, real winter, with icicles.
I never really thought that such emphatic seasonality would be mine to enjoy, because for most of my life I was sure you could only get it in places where I otherwise had no desire to live, like Virginia. We moved to Siskiyou County because it was the only part of California we could afford both economically and spiritually; I did not know about and remain deeply bewildered at the fact that it turned out to be a place with four perfect, jewel-like seasons. We moved there having only ever seen it in summertime, which was frankly foolish; we were aware of, and theoretically prepared for, real winter, but I was rather afraid that when it came right down to it I’d find myself fleeing back to a dank closet-sized rental in the Bay come the first bad winter. When we arrived in early October, the first surprise (at least, after all the unpleasant but inevitable surprises of moving, like discovering our oven had never been properly fitted for propane, or finding out the roof leaked in the rain) was the splendor of the autumn that greeted us – a glorious red-and-gold picturebook autumn, even more magnificent than fall in New England autumn, because in New England only the trees turn, whereas in Siskiyou the undergrowth all turned gold too. We lived, dazedly, in a gilded world.
That was a fine surprise, and then winter came, with the loveliest silvery powdery snow, like diamond dust when the sun hit it, and we discovered that we are, in fact, winter people. One snowy evening, not too long before we lost the house, I went out to get some wood from the woodshed, and as I turned to go back to the house the sight of it overcame me entirely: the gray twilight veil of falling snow, the candlelight shining out the windows, the smoke vanishing into the pure whiteness of the world. I stood staring for a while because it was so beautiful, and then it occurred to me that I was looking at something right out of the Thomas Kincaide paintings I had idolized as an eight-year-old before learning that he was a mercenary evangelist hack with a cocaine problem. But no one was selling a numbered print of this scene for a housewife in Kansas to hang over the mantle; it was my actual house. I, a normal adult human, lived there.
And then, too, the most potent metaphor I ever saw for the power of spring was something I witnessed in almost exactly the same spot, when we came back to the ruins a few months after the house was destroyed. It was late April (spring was late that year), and I saw the daffodils the first owner had planted all around the house were springing up through the ruins in huge masses of white and gold.
The man who planted those daffodils was a Korean war vet, the kind of very simple elderly white man who says something unconsciously racist in one breath and in the next tells you about all the flowers he planted and how he cut armfuls every spring to take to the men at the local VA. The house itself, like the man who built it, was a tangle of both maddening and touching qualities. He loved that piece of land with all his heart, and he sited the house in just about the worst possible location on it – in a ditch, more or less, at an angle precisely calculated to not make use of the beautiful woodland sunlight on the meadow behind. There were many fascinating and bewildering design flaws (not least the unprotected propane line running under the porch that led to its eventual destruction), and yet it was also snug as could be, warm as buttered toast in winter when the woodstove got going – even if it was also practically an oven in summer because the western sun poured straight in the windows all afternoon.
In spring, we found, in addition to the masses of daffodils, he had planted yucca (delicious edible flowers, which you can fry like zucchini blossoms, and happy you will be if you do), some rather spindly lilacs, peonies, bleeding hearts, and a forlorn Fuji apple, which never fruits because it’s not self-pollinating and the nearest apple tree is several miles away. We didn’t know about any of that, and since we arrived in October it was a rather surreal experience to wake up in the spring thaw five months later and find the house surrounded by thirteen varieties of daffodil, blossoming improbably in the middle of the national forest. Somehow I had forgotten them when we went back to see the house after the explosion, and it was very dreamlike indeed to see them so perfect and sprightly, thrusting their fragrant heads up through piles of insulation and out from under bits of broken roof, with the smashed remnants of our life strewn all around them.
Springtime is like that; which means, I guess, that life is like that. Desolation is a season both brutal and killing, but the spring cometh and cannot be held back. The world won’t give up living. For this I am eternally grateful.
I think it’s easiest in spring than it is at any other time to really believe that the earth loves you and wants you and all beings to survive and flourish. Part of this belief, I think, comes from the abundance of wonderful things to eat that leap suddenly from the bare earth in springtime. Asparagus, for example. Asparagus is often talked about as a seasonal food, but since you can get it almost year-round it is easy to forget that that’s what it is. This means that I often buy it without thinking, and wind up feeling like maybe I just don’t care for asparagus after all. I find it on sale surprisingly often at the wrong time of year, and I have only recently concluded that perhaps it is not being sold cheap because it is so abundant but because it simply isn’t very good.
Really bad asparagus is woody and inedible, but mediocre asparagus is mostly inoffensive. It tastes all right – it tastes like I remember asparagus mostly tasting – and its texture is all right, if sometimes a bit stringy – and I tend to think well, it’s a good healthy green, I’ll grill it or something, and everyone eats it politely and says it’s pretty good. But every now and then I remember the one single stalk of wild asparagus I was lucky enough to eat, when a friend showed us the absolutely secret patch of it growing on his property and made us swear fearsome oaths never to reveal its location, and then broke off a beautiful spear of it for us to try. It was about an inch thick and almost a foot long, which in normal asparagus would forebode a texture and flavor comparable to a large piece of kindling wood. This asparagus, however, was tender as a young green bean, with a flavor I can only describe in stupid rhapsodies. It was the Platonic ideal of Asparagus, the heaven that storebought asparagus can hope to go to if it’s lived a blameless life. It was so perfect it only made the rest of asparagusdom dim and gray by contrast, and I’ve tried to forget it, for otherwise I fear that all other asparagus shall be as dust in my mouth.
But this week D and I were out to dinner at a local restaurant we like, which has very interesting food, some of which is wildly overpriced and some of which is decidedly unsuccessful and some of which, unfortunately, is both, but some of which is also inspiring in its excellence, so we go there and eat off the happy hour menu and occasionally dip into the pricier plates for the sake of research. (I can’t countenance paying $14 for a plate of carrots more than once or twice a year, but they recently had a dish of roast carrots with gremolata and whipped feta which was a luscious dream I would never have dreamed up myself, and once tasted it was very easy to replicate at home for about a third of the price. I chiefly patronize restaurants in the hope of having this kind of experience.) Anyway, they had a dish of morels and asparagus on toast with crème fraiche that I couldn’t resist. It was, at $22, certainly the most expensive piece of toast I’ve ever eaten, but it was also quite possibly the best, and it is certainly something that can be constructed at home with a bit of patience and determination and a good chunk of time spent outdoors, so I’m not sorry to have made the investment.
Morels grow wild all over the woods of Siskiyou, and hunting them is a joyful springtime pursuit. They look like little penises made of honeycomb, and they taste like truffled earth and distilled essence of mushroom, and if you don’t clean them properly they are unbearably gritty. I still like chanterelles best, but I have a special feeling about morels – possibly because they don’t grow in the Bay Area, which in other ways offers a much richer foraging ecosystem than the woods of Siskiyou, but we found them without any trouble our first spring living in the woods. And in fact there was a kind of essential taste of spring in that pricey piece of toast; the asparagus was more than usually succulent, and it was perfect with the morels as only things that grow companionably can be.
It has become a foodie truism to say that eating seasonally is not only good for the planet but specially pleasurable, but this is a truism chiefly because it is true. The trouble is that eating seasonally is difficult. It’s not so much that it’s expensive – foraging tends to solve that problem, at least for me – but the bland availability of produce, especially on the West coast, is so undifferentiated that it’s hard to remember what seasonality actually means. It’s true that I can’t buy morels eleven months out of the year even if I wanted to (in fact I don’t buy them at all; I flatly refuse to pay $40 a pound for mushrooms I can find myself, and prefer to leave the buying of them to people who have the disposable income but not the leisure to enjoy the ancient and egalitarian joys of mushrooming), and certainly some things still remain solidly unavailable out of season (even the best greenhouse seems unable to produce a peach in December), but the truth is that I have no real idea when most foods are at their best, or how to tell the difference between their ideal state and the long period at which they are merely bland watery shadows of themselves.
The knowledge of true ripeness, which seems confined to small organic farmers and people who eat regularly at Chez Panisse, is a thing that has been taken away from ordinary people in the era of industrial agriculture, in exchange for access to readily available oat milk and subsidized pistachios. But I did realize I ought to go out and buy some asparagus. There were some fine bunches on sale at the Co-op, and I steamed mine gently until it was tender, rinsed it under cold water, doused it with olive oil and salt and pepper and a squeeze of Meyer lemon and a drizzle of (very expensive but idyllically worthwhile) tomato balsamic vinegar my brother-in-law gave me as a birthday gift, chilled it in the fridge, and served it with garlic toum for dipping. It was the first course for a spring dinner which went on to salmon pot pie and green salad and finished with strawberry shortcake. It turned out to be one of those dinners that ring in the mind afterwards, like the tone of a fine wineglass when you tap it, because it was right – right for the weather and the season and the company, and therefore nourishing in ways that cannot be calculated in Daily Values.
The asparagus turned out to be so sweet and green it tasted like what I imagine Spring herself would taste if she let you lick her wrist. It went a long way towards making the gray drizzle of March seem less drab and drear. As we ate, we talked about healing, and the strange vivacity that seems to abide in both bodies and souls, or minds – wounds want to close, scars want to form, life wants to return, meaning asks to be made out of monstrosity. There is a deep will to life inherent in the cosmos – “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, a line I love – although what it is exactly has never been identified, and I hope it never will be; I like to feel it as a grand deep green mystery underneath and all around me. Things want to live; and as they want to live, it is natural that they must heal, and return, and renew. So spring keeps coming, the life that follows death and disaster.
Not every spring springs equally. There are springs where the blossoms are blown away by gales, where the leaves grow stunted, where grasshoppers come and strip every twig, where nuclear fallout or white phosphorous poisons the groundwater. But the thing about spring is that it still comes anyway. If things want so much to live, it must mean that this business of living must mean something, must be worth it somehow. Given the depth of pain and misery in the world, one would be excused for thinking surely it must take something huge and heroic to counterbalance all that anguish: some vastly significant event, some colossal joy. Is it not strange, then, that all I seem to need to make me feel like I can endure almost anything that may befall me, from death to the downfall of nations, is the taste of young asparagus, at a twilight table in springtime with a few people I love?
The recipe for enjoying asparagus as we did is inimitable; if you have good asparagus it will be delicious whatever you do, and if you don’t, it won’t. But I can give the shortcake recipe. Strawberries are emphatically not in season yet, and are currently sold for close to their weight in gold at my local market despite being only slightly more edible; fortunately, I had the bright idea last July of putting a lot of very fragrant and delicious little high-season strawberries into a jar, sprinkling on plenty of sugar, letting it sit until a thick syrup formed, and putting the whole thing in the freezer to wait until I felt an itch for strawberries and cream. The weather is now just the sort of almost-nice-enough that makes one long for summer dishes, so I thawed the jar and ladled out the contents onto the following excellent and easy shortcake, which is crisp, flaky, and not too sweet:
SHORTCAKE FOR PILING WITH FRUIT AND CREAM
INGREDIENTS
2 cups AP flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons frozen butter
½ cup very cold heavy cream
⅓ cup cold milkINSTRUCTIONS
Preheat your oven to 425°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.In a large bowl combine the 2 cups of flour, ¼ cup granulated sugar, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt; whisk to combine. Grate the 6 tablespoons of frozen butter into this mixture on a box grater and stir well; the mixture should have the consistency of crumbs. Now add the cold ½ cup of heavy cream (I don’t recommend substituting half-and-half or milk, but you’re welcome to try it and see what happens) and ⅓ cup of milk (I used 2% and it worked just fine) and stir with a spoon until the dough just comes together into a mass; add a drizzle more cream if it’s not cohering well.
When it’s all one mass, press it flat in the bowl, fold it over on itself, press it flat again, rotate it 90 degrees, and repeat 5 or six times; this folding gives it nice flaky layers. Then flatten the dough gently into a rectangle about 1” thick on a cutting board. Find something nice and round and sharp-sided and about 3” wide – I don’t have a biscuit cutter, so I use a fancy liqueur glass with a thin rim – to cut out the shortcakes; press the cutter straight down into the dough without twisting. (This leaves the layers free to expand in the oven; if you twist, the edges smear and the shortcakes won’t rise so nicely.)
When you’ve cut as many as you can nicely – probably 2 or 3 – gently reform the bits of dough into a flat coherent shape again and cut the rest. The last scraps you can smoosh into a little baby shortcake. I get 6 shortcakes and a baby out of this recipe; you may get more or less, depending on your cutter size and the thickness of the dough.
Brush the top of the shortcakes with milk, and bake 14-16 minutes until golden brown on top. Let them cool a bit before serving.
Source: very slightly modified from Sugar Spun Run
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