And then yesterday happened. After an incredible soggy week, even by local standards, the sun dawned with just a hint of warmth. The warm water in the window-washing bucket actually stayed tepid for the time it took to wash the kitchen windows. I see a few bulbs poking out, and the little green buds are lending the palest of casts to the fruit trees. Of course, the sun is still weak and fleeting, limiting my time outdoors, but it prods me gently to dust off seed catalogues and think about planting some hope. I try to remember what sweet peas smell like and know I will sow some soon.
Fresh food is also at its low point: there are but a few stragglers in the vegetable drawers: a bunch of white turnips, a sorry wedge of cabbage and on the counter a lone acorn squash. I admit to resorting to mixed salad from California as even the local greens have all disappeared, and I'm not willing to give up on crunchy. We count the weeks (three!) until deliveries from the farm resume.
It is California that is saving us these days, as the panoply of citrus explodes at the coop: navel and blood oranges, tangelos, grapefruits, and lemons. Meyer lemons, those jewels of my childhood, warm, golden lemons, sweeter than sweet. I greedily snatched up an armful and gently lowered them into my shopping cart just as a mother lowers a sleeping baby into the crib.
At home, they clamor like children with their possibilities: Meyer lemon cake with honey-lavendar cream. Lavendar picked by the Little One in his gardening class last autumn. And since I'm already infusing the cream with the gentle purple flowers, I do a bit extra, and make a ganache for some truffles. With half a lemon leftover from that forray, I infuse some more cream with thyme, and use that for another herby-lemony combination. The final batch of truffles, to use up the last of the cream, is inspired by the lone comice pear in the bowl that will be my afternoon snack: Williams pear liqueur. I'm thinking I will be popular at pickup time after school with my little white boxes full of hand-dipped brown.
There remain ten golden beauties on the counter. Into a pot of boiling water go six of them, to be halved and salted and put up for Moroccan chicken in the coming weeks. I add chicken to the shopping list, to be ready when the preserved lemons are. And then there were four.
Four little lemons, just enough for a tiny batch of marmelade, perhaps with a vanilla bean. Another jar or two to tuck on the shelf of preserves, with a smear leftover for breakfast this week. It seems odd, preserving winter, but just as those boisterous berries of summer submit to the jar, to release their excess of summer in the dead of winter, so will these lemons impart their tiny, quiet rays of hope in their own turn.
