How was your winter?

Spokane Farmers Market -- 5th and Browne.

I am a college professor so each fall when the new academic year gets underway I ask and am asked a lot "how was your summer?"  But today, the opening day of the Spokane Farmers Market, one of the farmers with whom I have become friendly asked "How was your winter?"  A good reminder that the wax and wane of the year means different things to different people.  They had much to tell as did I.

It has been a cold, wet spring and I have been worried for the region's farmers.  I have heard on the news that the vineyards are weeks behind in flowering and some of the garden starts at the market today were newly out of their greenhouses.  But today, a glorious, sunny and warm spring-turning-to-summer day, the Spokane Farmers Market opened.  There were more stalls and more things for sale than I had expected. 

Golden Morel Mushrooms

I was able to get some really wonderful things.  I got asparagus, spring onions, walnuts cured from last fall, some hard red winter wheat flour, some beautiful eggs and most spectacularly, some golden morel mushrooms.  One pays for those mushrooms dearly, but there is really nothing else like them and here in the inland northwest there are pockets of them that are well-guarded and well-loved.  I am thinking that tomorrow I will make quiche with the eggs, asparagus, mushrooms and onions. 

There were other things for sale, too.  Potatoes, jellies and jams, fresh cheese and bread, radishes, rhubarb, carrots, beef, pork and chicken, and lots and lots of garden starts of many varieties and sizes.

I am back to my late spring/summer/early fall ritual.  Up early on Saturdays and to the Farmers Market, then to the co-op if there is anything I need (although with more meat, cheese and eggs being sold now at the market, trips to the co-op may be fewer this season!), then home and laundry and still some of morning left at that point.  It is a ritual grounded in both the simplicity and necessity of daily life.

 So when my professor friends ask my how my summer was, not my winter, I'll have something both wonderful and ordinary to tell them.  I ate well, talked with those that grew what I ate, enjoyed the city and the country at once, that's how my summer will be.