Things We Count On

It's spring, and the signs are everywhere. A single crow has taken up honking lessons and is sitting at the tippy top of a fir, where he practices from ten in the morning until dusk. Gaannngkh. Gaannngkh. Gaannngkh. It's one beep every ten seconds, give or take, and will go on for about a month. Dave is occupying himself outdoors on some sort of project for us or for a neighbor, and in another hour he will suddenly drop his tools and go stand under the fir and yell hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Or sooner, if the project is not going well. The entire local biosphere is responding predictably to the rhythm of the ages. Down on Alberta Street, Gimme A Quarter Guy will have set up between the Mexican restaurants for the afternoon. GQ is an immense man with a menacing expression who tends to unsettle newcomers. He stands on the sidewalk and whenever anyone passes by he growls gimme a quarter, going off like a proximity car alarm. You can usually count on him being right there but once when we were driving we saw him several blocks away outside a Walgreen's. We saw his mouth drop open when a small elderly gentleman walked by and the old man spooked like a horse in a thunderstorm and emptied all his pockets before hurrying on down the sidewalk. Even from inside the car we knew what GQ had said, and he never says thank you. Someone has tried to sweeten him up of late and now when he says gimme a quarter and we reply, sorry, I don't have a quarter, he says oh, sorry. He'll get a buck next time.

Birds are coming back, the ones that wintered somewhere else. Many critters move around, the same way people summer in the Hamptons and winter in Florida. That's the usual seasonal cadence, but here we have ants that are probably nearby all year, but spring in our kitchen. They just want to get out from under all the wet, and our kitchen is a favored resort. We see their little brochures on the countertops, and the tours of the sugar drawer are always booked up. Natives are known for finding tourists irritating, and we're no exception, but the ants are not put off. They keep coming and coming, thick as Germans on the Riviera.

Tax day has come and gone and that means that the newer gardeners are going to be coming home with big tomato plants any time now. We're officially past our last-freeze date, although some winters, like this one, it never really even got that low. So they'll be unloading plants out of their hatchbacks and fluffing up the soil and tucking them in, and for the next month and a half we'll see them going out and bending over them, fists on their hips, and walking back inside, increasingly morose. By Memorial Day, when we will be planting our own tomatoes, our neighbors' tomatoes will be exactly the same size they are now, only a little more dejected-looking. Ours will take right off with a bit of warmer weather, and we will have our annual bump of smugness for a week or so, but every one of us will tend those vines until October, when we'll be Googling green tomato recipes. It's a sweet exercise in optimism and speaks well of us here. We're like little horticultural Cubs fans.

We cherish these hallmarks of every season and anchor our lives to them. They help us to imagine that things will always be the same and our own time will never end. Very soon we will be getting into election season and someone will produce a sign with a red, white, and blue motif suggestive of a flag, and the sign will have someone's name on it and the words "THE TIME IS NOW." Which will be true, and may be the last thing we can agree on.

Summer's Just Around The Corner, But It's A Very Long Block

It's coming up on Memorial Day, the day Portlanders traditionally begin to think about putting out their tomato starts in a few weeks, say, early June, which is our name for early July. At least the old-timers do. Newer immigrants have had their tomatoes out since the official date of the last expected frost, April 15th, and there they remain, precisely the same size a month and a half later, unchanged except for a morose aspect. By Memorial Day the plants will be overcome by gloom. Word might be getting out, however. Nurseries report a decline in tomato-start sales over the same period last year. Upon further analysis, it turns out that the people who believe they can grow a tomato before June in Portland are the very same people who believe the world will end on the 21st of May. We'll miss them.

Nothing says "summer" like a tomato. They are born of heat; their very flavor recalls barbecues and beer, muffin-tops, shot-off fingers and the disturbance of the peace. Here in the Willamette Valley, too, even the smell of a tomato is evocative. We bite into its luscious flesh, seeds and juice streaming down our chins, and close our eyes--it speaks to us. It says "five minutes before winter." It says "time to put the studded tires on." There's nothing like it. We quiver with anticipation as they begin to blush during the World Series. Tomatoes are Red Sox fans, too.

It would be swell to have them ripen a little earlier, and plenty of people try to make it happen. Heat is the key. We throw everything we have at it: black mats and heating pads and the Wall O' Water and hair dryers and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, just upriver. Even the neighborhood cats get in on the action, rumpling up the soil and depositing something warm, but it's no use. We plant varieties like Early November Girl or Beefmaybe, anything advertising a ripening time of 65 days or better, and they're as good as their word. The problem, of course, is that the 65 days are not necessarily consecutive.

There's even talk of giving them a little boost with artificial growth hormones, but that's a chancy proposition. No one wants a repeat of the recent exploding watermelon fiasco; on the other hand, their use in chickens did jumpstart the nugget industry.

We're a sweet and silly bunch, we Portland tomato growers, a group that is all too easy to make fun of, but I salute this cadre of groundless optimists, disdaining the easy pleasures of this modern world and looking forward to our dubious harvest. We plant--yea, even unto the end of the driveway, with prayer, faith, reverence, and a little lime and eggshells, and bless our gullible hearts, we patiently await the rapture. Bacon and lettuce at the ready.