food. according to me.

Just Like Candy

It is finally, certainly, springtime. I was away over the weekend, and when I returned, I could see exactly how much the squashes and the peas and the lettuces in the garden had grown in my absence. When I tucked them in on Thursday night, the summer squash were only very new sproutlings barely arrived through the soil. By Monday each had grown large, dark green third and fourth leaves. The chickens seemed bigger. The dirt, darker. The lilies had opened their blooms.

California never seemed like a desert to me before. My parents live just outside of Salinas, the Salad Bowl of the World. I grew up eating fresh, hand-cut broccoli for dinner four nights a week, and unrefrigerated lettuces, cabbages, and the like on the other nights. Prodding me to eat more veggies, Dad always said that steamed zucchini and patty pan squash tasted "just like candy." I ate it back then, though I did not agree. A few weeks ago I uttered those very same words to a friend, and was more surprised to hear my father's pet phrase come out of my mouth than I was to realize I now share his esteem for summer squash.

But this last weekend, their yard seemed dry and hard to me. It might have been the heat wave, or the ominous plague of caterpillars hanging in the oak trees, darkening their prickly leaves. Plants still grow like mad there – they get so much more sun than I do here in Portland. Mom's tomato plants are easily five times the size of mine, and the backyard trees are a frenzy of nascent apples, figs, walnuts, and cherries. Despite the evident fertility of the place, it seemed to me that all of that food grows in spite of its surroundings, not because of them.

Flying up from the dusty Salad Bowl and the rocky coast, Portland looked to me like a jungle or a giant vegetable garden or a terrarium. I am a year-round fan of this place. I chose it deliberately and I suspect I will stay here for some time. This part of the year, though, is a favorite. Winter always feels a bit too long, and the Californian in me starts to panic that the rain will go on until we are drowned. I see now, as I do every year, that we will dry out, probably become uncomfortably hot for a few days, and that things will grow. In my adopted terrarium-home, things grow. And all I want to do – so much more than the end-of-term school projects presently dominating my waking life – is to be out in the yard, digging my fingers into the dark earth and cheering on the squash.