A Year in Review Through Seasons and Spreads
Winter
Flavor Profile | White Nectarine and Peach with Lemon Verbena, Strawberry Linden Blossom, Apricot Banana, Cherry Pink Peppercorn, Fig Cardamom, Grapefruit Dragonfruit
It feels somewhat cruel that for half the planet, the year opens with winter — days are the shortest and nights the coldest at the same time that reflections on losses and unfulfilled promises become seemingly compulsory. Trees are barren, the holidays over, and visits infrequent. Our dreams for the past year fade, and we are placed back at the ostensible start of things. What is perhaps most upsetting about this arrangement, though, is the false promise of rebirth and renewal that the new year provides.
When January approaches I am reminded of Knausgaard’s ruminations in Winter, and the fact that like him, I am an adult, and just as it is for him, “openness towards the new, the leap and its promise of freedom are unwanted.” It is easy to fall into sorrow as the sunset pushes back ever so slightly, as we are asked once again to take a childlike view of the future as a place “out there,” one of pure potential, a free world that would welcome us if we were only willing to make the leap. But as the vastness of the future opens up before us, and the lightness of opportunity balances against the weight of the past, this “freedom” starts to feel a bit less free. No matter our age, and no matter how fast the years pass, everything seems to contract around this time of forced reflection, and with contractions comes discomfort.
The pain becomes acute at the point when we forget that the slow lengthening of the days is something that happens every year, and that this is not going to change any time soon. The same arrogance that gives birth to scrupulosity convinces us that despite millennia of tilts and turns, seas rising and falling, we may be worthy enough to see the whole thing just stop, as if responding to our unique situation. More than the warmth of mulled wine, cardamom cookies, and peppered jams, this is what makes winter really become winter.
But before we know it, the mercy of linear time steps in. The season comes to an end, and uncomfortable discussions are tabled until next year. We look forward to looking back again with the addition of the new year’s selected freedoms. And as spring sweeps us away, we thank God that winter only comes once a year.
Highlights: Fig cardamom spread, a launch, shooting at the quarry
Lowlights: Alone together, a papal loss, apricot banana spread
Spring
Flavor Profile | Raspberry Dark Chocolate, Peach Jasmine Flower, Honey, Lemon Yuzu, Apricot Lavender, Wild Blueberry Palm Leaf
If winter burdens us with all that was not, spring brings with it the relief of what is, and the anticipation of what’s to come. Snow lines rise as our mouths start to water at the thought of wildberries. Without any action on our part, the world starts to be again — as if the skunk cabbage and honeybees and every hidden thing came together, took stock of the situation, and decided just when to come alive. The shape of our wants even change as spring breaks, becoming less about lost opportunities and more of a “nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land.”1 The possibility of new experiences, free from any value judgment, is made real.
To build or travel or fall in love in the winter is a sign of some strength or intentionality, a rejection of the frozen world. But to do these things in spring is not any sort of rebellion — honestly, they hardly feel like things that we “do” at all. Rather, spring seems to catch us in its momentum, anonymizing us amongst the fauna acting and reacting to the return of warmth and the presence of the afternoon sun, freeing our instincts and making many of these decisions for us. Salamanders breed, bringing life back to their riparian homes, and we begin to leave our own winter dwellings, moved by something outside us until we find ourselves in a novel or out of state or in an unfamiliar bed.
For those lucky enough to be pulled far from home, the spring offers an almost guilt-free chance to explore all that is out there. The oppressive heat of summer has yet to hit our travel destinations, and we are safe to assume that ice won’t be an issue. We can pack lighter and stay out later, eat less for weight and more for pleasure, and fully submit to our role in the touristic ecosystem. The whole endeavor is so easy that the question of why we are doing what we are doing fails to cross our minds. We are not the Sartrean waiter,2 overly concerned about touring as a tourist ought to, nor are we like the Rick Steves acolytes so obsessed with not being tourists at all3. We are simply visiting. And by some seasonal luck, our only real concern is when it will all come to an end.
The ultimate joy of spring appears not even in these experiential periods where we step outside ourselves and our lives, but when they conclude, and we are gifted even more time with which to be! With the hard fading of winter now months out of our minds, the relaxed and heavy slide into summer seems almost too easy. Lavender blooms as the hidden responsibilities of summer approach and we risk forgetting just how blessed we are to be part of all that is.
Highlights: Mountain time, raspberry dark chocolate spread, the Saint-Tropez of Spain
Lowlights: Honey, lemon yuzu spread, poor house-manners
Summer
Flavor Profile | Caramel Cinnamon, Cherry Hibiscus Flower, Mirabelle Plum Spice, Orange Guava Lime, Peach Mint Spread, Pineapple Ginger
With summer, thoughts of time running out begin to eat at the mind. 100° days are obnoxious only insofar as they drag on, but when the last one passes, the reality that the year is coming to an end sets in. I think this is why I have always found summer to be the most oppressive, despairing of the seasons — if spring was a time to be swept up in the reemergence of life, summer is a time to make the most of things, and to fail at that is a sin verging on mortal. This feeling makes sense in children, for whom summer actually does represent some limited resource that can be maximized or squandered before returning to class. But for adults (and especially adults without children), the lack of a real limit to what summer could be can become a prison in and of itself.
One would think that, if anything, summer ought to simply be an intensification of all that was wonderful about spring. We start to see salmon on the Nisqually, citrus fruits that became expensive and rare return to our tables, and those trails that had been too perilous to try now invite us to visit. So then why is spring a time of comfortably relinquished control, and summer a time of grasping, of some ghostly obligation? Why is it that the “rapturous sublime”4 of summers’ past ache so strongly in us?
Maybe it is the fact that, like winter, summertime behooves reflection. With the heat holding steady and the days as long as they can be, we begin to crest. And as we look over the hill to the year’s end, no matter how slight the grade, we are forced to reckon with what is yet to be done, and the limits of a year start to show. Summer blesses us with 12, 13, even 14 hours of daylight, and almost begs us to make use of it all. And once the solstice passes, and 14 hours roll back to 13, the fear of failing to do so takes hold.
This tension of summer as a time of supposed leisure that imposes its own perverse limits is one that we unconsciously know, but which a fear of appearing ungrateful can keep us from facing. No one wants to feel that the summer is but a time to prep for the autumn, or to admit that the brightest day of the year can be as crushing as the darkest. We are so lucky to be alive! And especially this time of year! So even if one does their traveling in July, or spends their August swimming and sunbathing and eating fresh fruit, the reality (as obvious as it may sound) is this: while spring swept us into summer, summer drops us into autumn. But with the suffocating liberty of summer snatched away, what is left for us?
Highlights: Mirabelle plum spice spread, a wedding, a double feature
Lowlights: Smoke and haze, pineapple ginger spread, a fracture
Autumn
Flavor Profile | Quince, Rhubarb Strawberry, Orange Mandarin Passionfruit, Mango Raspberry Lime, Cherry Christmas Spice
When we explain the seasons to children, the clearest signs of autumn are the retreat of animals and the transformation of plant life. The loss of leaves and waves of hibernation clearly illustrate what most see as a purely transitional season. But when we focus singularly on the changes that take place, we miss the beauty that is the loss of summer. This descent into autumn offers the summer-pained a reprieve: from the expectations to make the most of each day. From the planning for the second half of the year. From the idea that the vigor of the hotter seasons has built in us some sort of control.
As the days begin to shorten, and our time to act begins to slip away, we must be honest with ourselves about our autumnal realities. There is likely not enough time to achieve all of the things we had hoped to. The sights and sounds of nature have largely disappeared from our daily lives. The activities and pleasures of a long, hot day are now practically out of reach, at least for another year. And in stark contrast to the control offered by a summer well spent, this all happens without our consent and without a clear next step.
This is not to say that there is not beauty to be found in autumn as there is in the other seasons — but it is a beauty of sacrifice that can be harder to see. Days of exploration disappear as our calendars are redetermined by work, school, and family relations. A swim in the lake is replaced with a walk along its shore. Raspberries and cherries that we’d so excitedly picked are frozen or preserved as we scramble to use up the last of the rhubarb. With the approach of the holidays, we are asked to give of our time and our treasure to those we know, and the libertarian bent of the warmer months is wiped away. It is now that we must admit that the end of our year is not the one we had designed. And there is a beauty in this reality, just as there was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
This is autumn’s true gift: a reality into which we can live, and the freedom to let go of impossible futures. It is the freedom to take stock of what is still possible and act accordingly. And it is a freedom that offers us the chance to more honestly consider what we have done and what we have failed to do, with a grace we didn’t have to offer ourselves in January. But as autumn ends, and the dead of winter approaches, we settle back into the unfortunate state that we always seem to start the year with: of reflection on our missteps and the burden of righting them all in the new year.
Highlights: The deep south, rhubarb strawberry spread, inflammation and repair
Lowlights: Admissions of defeat, spirals, quince spread
1 Vladimir Nabokov, Mary
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism
3 Rick Steves, “The Ugly Tourist (and How Not to Be One)“
4 Ella Rhodes Higginson, “Dreams of the Past“
Jitter 