Nature's First Green is Gold

It may be a week into June, but spring has been long coming in the Inland Northwest.  I was reminded of the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost tonight as I was making two salads for tomorrow.  One for lunch and one for dinner.  After teaching class and our field trip to Roast House Coffee, I am heading across town to a meeting about our local food community sponsored by the Regional Health District.  I'll surely have interesting things to say on both the field trip and the meeting.

I have been loving my salads recently, but likely only because they are the first salads of the season.  They really aren't very interesting or colorful.  The salads I made for tomorrow have red leaf lettuce, cucumber, English peas, roasted asparagus and leftover oven fried chicken.  The chicken is the only thing that isn't green!

I am hoping that soon there will be more colorful veggies to be adding to the salads, but that of course will mean the end of the asparagus and phasing out of the peas.  The seasons within the growing season do march on.  As I do more reading about local food and sustainability and the critique of the local food movement, I am struck once again that eating seasonally is a better compromise on a lot of these issues.  I eat locally because I want to eat more intentionally, more seasonally, even though it is often difficult being an urbanite as I am.  I have more information about my food this way, and that is reassuring to me given my food values.

Nature's first green is gold--as we anxiously await the green coming into our lives as leaves on trees, lush grass and good food, we are reminded that there is something bigger than ourselves that has a memory into the past and will stretch out ahead of us long past our lives.  The green that indicates the beginnings of life will eventually fall away, as the title says, "nothing gold can stay."  There is a life cycle at work both in our own lives and the plants and animals we eat.  We can't forget that.  Frost's words are a very nice way of reminding ourselves of this fact of life.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"
           by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.