Summer Foretaste

It's still April, but yesterday felt like summer. Mom's ladies' group was meeting in our home in the evening, so Dad, John, and I were expected to keep a low profile. I was in the kitchen when the ladies arrived, finishing cilantro rice, venison stew seasoned with lime and chilies, and avocado slaw for the boys and me. Mom had a pot of soup on the stove, too, for the women. They entered to savory smells and the clatter of pot lids and girl chatter, dressed in sandals and a bouquet of eager summer colors: peach, mint green, turquoise, pink. There were hugs and greetings while one lady unpacked her warm berry crisp and vanilla ice cream, tucking them into the oven and freezer to hold them at the perfect temperature. Another brought calla lilies to Mom and her sister, a token of thanks and of summer. They noticed John's starts, bending eager stems towards the big dining room window to soak up the light, and we talked about his farm plans and how they could get in line to buy his produce.

As the ladies dished up their soup and settled around the table, I checked my rice one more time and decided the boys and I could eat, too. I found them setting up the electric fence around the beehive, in preparation for protecting the inhabitants that would arrive on the morrow, and asked them to ready the picnic table. They carried it to a discreet location, away from the dining room window, and wiped the pollen from table and benches. Then we ferried the food and place settings out to the table from my staging area in the laundry room and dug spoons into our steaming bowls.

The chickens hemmed and hawed in their run behind the garden, wild with garlic and miner's lettuce and happy spring weeds. The grass, freshly mown, was bright and soft under our feet. The boys talked of farming equipment and bees and baseball; I listened in (they were talking about the Yankees vs. Mariners game, and Cano, who recently moved from the former team to the latter) and contemplated the robust rhubarb plant and what occasion was coming up that would require the baking of some kind of pie or tart or cake or muffin.

I remarked that ice cream would be an ideal finish to the spicy venison stew, and John reminded me that we had some in the freezer left from Tim's birthday celebration. But the ladies had now started their evening, and how could we retrieve the ice cream without disturbing them? The boys agreed that on the basis of my gender, I was the one for the job, and I began looking for an opportunity. When we heard the clink of dishes inside indicating that the women were in transition between table and living room, I made my move. I slipped into the kitchen in the midst of dishwasher loading and food clean up, fetched the ice cream, and returned to our quiet picnic. It was the perfect finale to our meal, and we savored it, lingered a bit more. But the sun, while still lighting the sky, was long gone from our tree-guarded yard, and the ice cream accentuated the cool of the evening. So, we filed quietly into the laundry room with our stacks of dishes, and the boys returned outside to finish their fencing while I slipped upstairs to put away things from the day, and to prepare for the next day and the night of rest.