The Late Season Kitchen
Summer Draws Down
We measure time clinically or personally. Labor Day signals the end of summer—that’s clinical. The personal ways we recognize time can give more pleasure and be more wistful: We look forward to Fall when apples are in season, the baseball playoffs arrive and school buses return. We bring the corduroy and tweed back into rotation the first day below sixty.
At our cabin, I know that summer is drawing down when our refrigerator starts to empty. Now every fridge is a matrix of ambitions, habits, good intentions and—no judgments—laziness. Our location here is somewhat remote, so we bring food from far away. This involves elaborate planning, lists, coolers and designated trunk space. When my sister makes her famous Greek Fest or I go on a grill jag, then this planning is even more intricate.
There are urgent questions: Who will bring wine? Who’s near the good butcher (and does the butcher have a 6 lb. pork shoulder)? Who’s driving past the farm stand, the bakery, the gas station that sells corn picked today or the other gas station that sells cases of Leinenkugel’s bottles. These are matters of great family import and we need a wheeled cart to take boxes, bags and cases from the car to the house.
At its peak, the kitchen is very full and reassuring. But as we get closer to September we let things take their course and there’s a different sort of math. We’re running low of rye bread, but do we really need more? The lists are shorter, there’s less ambition. No more French black olives, no more prosciutto, no more little tomatoes.
You notice other things too. The sun hits the dock later in the morning and earlier in the evening. The water is cooler, the days are shorter. Football season arrives. There are fewer kids on the lake. You finally start getting email responses from Europeans who’ve been on vacation for six weeks.