Primavera

Spring is all around. The ferns have unfurled, the days are warm enough I’ve heard AC window units buzzing from third floor windows, sidewalks wet beneath, ramp season has come and withered. Every year, a miracle. And spring brings new bounty at the markets, new dishes at the restaurants (duh). On the palate, green, above all, verdancy.

The most primaveral bite I’ve had since the pea shoots shot was the “carta di musica” with fresh ricotta, sott’olio favas and torn mint at Manhattan restaurant King. A cracker-thin flatbread featuring, besides the listed ingredients, black dashes of some seed I don’t recall and zest of lemon. The phone did not eat first, nor at all, but my eyes certainly did, and the windows were open, corner restaurant, the street warm and green, the sun threatening to turn to drizzle and subsequently doing so, we ordered a bottle of white wine for the table, we ordered the menu, most of it, party of six, late brunch, Saturday, and I had four bites of carta, which, yes, was musica.

I’ve been taking lunch on our back patio in the sun. This week it’s been a grilled cheese (local sourdough, cheddar, mayonnaise, caramelized onion hummus, house hot sauce from the pizza place down the block, basil) and a light salad (arugula, grape tomatoes, pickled onions, basil, cilantro, green onion, Maldon salt, olive oil, black pepper). It’s a quick preparation, its eating an inhalation, and I finish with cold coffee, the last cup from the pot I brewed three-and-a-half hours earlier. By the time I rise to return to work, I’m warmed through, satisfied, recaffeinated for the rest of the day.

Eight springs ago, I lay in the grass at Portland's Colonel Summers Park. The Colonel, so it's said, "was the commanding officer of the Second Oregon Volunteers Regiment in the Spanish-American War." And I was commanding a cannabis lemonade (an edible, I suppose — a drinkable?) spiked with Patron my coworker at the ramen shop had given me as a parting gift (in two weeks, I would move to New Orleans); we'd worked together only a few months and he green, not that I wasn't, but my shade somewhat jaded and blue, his more the yellow of fresh shoots. The gift was wholly unnecessary but charming, a prayer at the altar of back-of-house camaraderie. The drink itself a communion with the primaveral spirit. I was 22, it was April, the sky was blue, and the world lay around, thousands of miles in every direction.

But I lay in the grass at Portland's Colonel Summers Park, and it had rained that morning; the grass was dry (my clothes did not dampen, neither did they stain), but the ground beneath was slaked, and I could hear it, I could hear the grass talking. And above me, new growth on the spruce, tender tips light green, not pale, just green, green as in youthful, unproven, venturing out into their world, into the shallow airspace of Portland's Colonel Summers Park.

Primavera. Latin, Spanish, Italian — primus: first, earliest; ver: true. This is the season. Winter starts the year, but spring is the truth, the prime of life on God’s green Earth.