Making sunshine

I spent yesterday morning slogging jet-lagged through an unseasonably cold, hard rain to hunt and gather my way home from the airport. Frankly, it was a pain to bundle up and wade through sodden parking lots at three different food markets and a wine store, especially after a night of flying through the air without sleep, but provisioning is my passion so each stop actually made my day brighter. I drove the last miles home buoyed by amazingly sunny thoughts that beat back my weariness with giddy joie de vivre.

From the CD player in my car, Paul Simon was singing: "So beautiful or so what? Life is what you make of it”, and I had just made of mine a feast. I had laid my hands on and thus laid in fruity olive oil, fresh local cheese, crisp and salty nuts, luscious Kalamata olives, freshly plucked sweet Vidalia onions, thick and willowy dill, warmly aromatic bread, densely molten chocolate cookies, simple wines, darkly roasted coffee and, for a $5 splurge, a flashy spring splash of red tulips. As soon as I got home, a dear friend who I hadn’t seen for more than half a year would come to share all this with me. We would sit at the table with red tulips, sipping, sampling, savoring this time to be face to face uninterruptedly catching up. This is the best friend I have for, as they say, chewing the fat, one of the rainy day people to depend on.

Food, friends, flowers…how much better can life get?

I was putting my provisions in place when my friend showed up in her boxy red Scion. “I’ve been to the market,” she hollered as she got out, “even in the rain. I had to get good stuff because it’s you.” In she came with an overflowing tote and out came a container of freshly picked Maine crabmeat, handmade pepperoni, soft and dazzling white herb marinated cheese “from a new creamery you need to know about”, and a large bag of lettuce “which I made Dick cut right off the plants he was selling in pots. He did that when I said it was for you.”

My little house had magically become a treasure chest of great riches. I fussed with coffee and poured mineral water into wine glasses while my friend fixed a meal of fresh crabmeat with dill and chives, miraculously renewed in my yard, on a bed of just picked lettuce, that melt-in-the mouth dazzlingly white fresh cheese spread on hunks of the just baked baguette, salty olives and soft chocolate cookies. I sat down at my table with utter happiness, not wanting to be anywhere else or have one thing more. My heart and my mind were that full. On a planet awash in a downpour of horror, hate and heartache, I had before me the freshest food won from Maine land and sea, a dear friend, a faithful farmer, and red tulips popping out of a black ceramic pitcher.

My friend swore I had never looked so good. Well...yes... I was glowing with ecstatic joy, eating and yakking and drinking coffee so I could stay awake to savor this rain of enormous blessings. I wish the same sunshine to everyone.

P.s. That dazzlingly white fresh cheese came from a new micro-creamery in Durham, Maine: Spring Day Creamery and the intrepid farmer who picked the lettuce off his plants was Dick Keough of Keough Family Farms.