The Last of Last Year’s Food
JUNE 16, 2007 - Things have been getting pretty serious around the ol' blog lately, so today let me just share a simple observation. Two days ago, I visited the farmers' market - it's that time of year when the stalls are wall-to-wall green, but the one bright red treasure was the year's first strawberries. They were unbelievably good, somehow more emphatically strawberryish than usual, in that odd way that some years are so much better than others.
Back at home, I remembered that I still had a pair of apples left over from last autumn's crop. The harvest had stood by me all these months, each apple crisp and fresh tasting. I reached for the final two, and - they were wrinkled. Not much, but the very first puckering and softening of the skin was unmistakable, in the same way that small spots of mold have just now begun to form on the rinds of the toughest winter squashes.
They just made it. What a strange and marvelous thing - the last apples and squash, fading just in time for the spring greens and the year's first fruit. -JBM
