Come the middle of April?no matter how cold the weather or how hard the rainfall, regardless of whether the Lenten rose is blooming, or a single song bird has appeared, shivering, from the south?I can always depend on one harbinger of spring: the opening of our local farmers? market.
I love few things more than the experience of the pick-your-own farm. You can dress in your oldest, rattiest clothes; linger outdoors for hours in a beautiful setting; and best of all, you can eat whatever you like, and no one minds a bit.
When I was a child growing up outside New York City in the late 1960s, the holiday season started in early December when Ohma, my maternal grandmother, arrived from her home in Switzerland bearing more luggage than even the Magi.
A decade ago, I agreed to marry a man with two young sons whom I'd known less than a year. When I began planning to move to his llama farm 85 miles from Washington, DC, friends were incredulous. "Are you insane?" a fellow political appointee at the State Department asked. "Why would you want to do that?"
Of the many odd, old and quirky things that adorn my kitchen - my husband's great-grandfather's hand-forged blacksmith tools, an 1898 apple corer, two muslin embroidery samplers, and my antique Swiss butter and cookie molds - I love none more than the metal contraption that's clamped to one end of my kitchen counter.
Once, the giant silver maple that shades our house was a sapling.