Stories

Summer is my least favorite season. I am a ghostly pale person, I sweat easily, and I do not garden successfully. I am allergic to chlorine and can’t spend days by the pool without breaking out in hives, and I am not generally given to hiking, camping, kayaking or doing any of those other things that involve being outside, sweating, and getting burned. I complain a lot about the heat, which may explain why I often find myself alone in my air conditioned house drinking iced tea and reading.

Today, though, today it was 80 degrees after an interminable and bitterly cold winter. Stepping outside tentatively in my cotton skirt and flip flops, I was overwhelmed by sense memories, good ones, the kind that made me sit down on the peeling porch steps and savor them. As the hair at the back of my neck coiled inexorably into ringlets, and the warm air extended its seductive fingers to touch parts of me that have not been unwrapped in public for five months, it seemed that maybe I didn’t hate summer any more.

I remembered all of the Only Summer things, the Farmer’s Market on Sunday morning, bags full of vegetable love in the form of tiny Patty Pan squash, gritty zucchini, scallions with shining white bulbs, garlic scapes, baby eggplants, tiny and fiery Hmong peppers, and the tomatoes, oh Lord the tomatoes in their juicy, flashy glory.

It is one of life’s little truths that the simplest dishes are usually the most satisfying.  While I often dream about elaborate feasts consisting of all sorts of exotic dishes and breathtaking desserts, the recipes that I come back to again and again are the ones that were introduced to me as a child.

A paper-thin slice of veal flash-fried in a bit of olive oil with garlic and oregano. Creamy arborio rice served with a pat of butter and a handful of freshly-grated parmiggiano. Apple or peach slices dipped quickly in homemade wine and then gobbled up.

Simple yet completely satisfying, these are the dishes that guided me through childhood, and guide me still. I’m not sure what it is about these dishes that makes them so important to me. Maybe it’s that these dishes remind me of home. And maybe it’s that they are the dishes that I associate with the people that have had the greatest impact on my life: my parents and grandparents. Somehow, I am comforted knowing that these are the foods that they ate as children.

When I am at my home on Orcas Island, Washington and away from the concrete jungle of Los Angeles, I morph from a well dressed city slicker to a somewhat cave-like hunter and forager.

At this time of year, I trample around the forests, looking in the ferns with my beady eyes for the first sign of fiddleheads, I watch the crocuses peep up through the ground as the blossom bursts on the apple trees; but most of my cavewoman thoughts are towards the ocean, the icy, clear ocean filled with great big fierce Dungeness crabs.

Catching crabs is my passion. This past winter, the season opened for a few weeks in December and I was out there in my little row boat, freezing rain pelting down, hardly able to find my boeys due to the rough water; my husband watching bewildered through binoculars, from our little cottage; and as I pulled up my traps to see my haul of crabs, I was happier than a child on Christmas morning.

First, here’s what I didn’t read: anything that included a vampire or a werewolf. I did read about one ghost—in Anne Tyler’s The Beginner's Goodbye.

Much of my summer reading focused, as usual, on mysteries: I read all three of Gillian Flynn’s novels, starting with this summer’s blockbuster Gone Girl and then working my way through her two earlier ones — Dark Places and the even darker Sharp Objects. Three clever and engaging picks were Joanne Dobson’s academic mystery Cold and Pure and Very Dead, Harry Dolan’s pomo noir tale Bad Things Happen, and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (just as riveting as her other novels).  

I devoted two nights to James Renner’s The Man from Primrose Lane, which veered from noir to sci fi, and made me think longingly of the relatively simpler physics of The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffinegger, a past summer’s selection. It did occur to me that some might find my liking for mysteries obsessive when I realized that I was reading Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters while watching an episode of Inspector Lewis. Mysteries, however, with their murders, trickery, and restoration of order, remain an excellent antidote to articles on education (I read roughly 500 of those).