The only thing finer than drinking a Manhattan outside on a warm spring evening is drinking two. The perfection of the moment begins to diminish ever so slightly with the third, but it’s still a worthwhile endeavor. And when you add friends to the mix, other honest to god flesh and blood humans, and a happy wife, and a tottering baby daughter, and a few slanting rays of warm evening sunlight, that third Manhattan seems like a positive necessity.
It was a week ago now, or nearly, when the first blush of an early spring showed herself. For a brief stretch of days, the temperature climbed, the snow melted, and the world seemed to soften. I worked outside in shirt sleeves. The iron-hard ground eased into mud and even then I was happy for it. It was a temporary flirtation and nothing more – March is not so free with her gifts – but the weather was no less sweet for being fleeting. In a year like this you take what you can get.
Our good friends, finishing their work day at their new farm-garden down the road, asked about stopping by on the warmest of those few warm days and of course we said yes. We stayed socially distant, naturally, and stayed outside, which was the whole point, and for just over an hour we drank and chatted convivially and watched the baby wander the lawn on coltish legs. We’ve spent countless hours doing much the same, but not recently. It was a simple, everyday sort of occasion made heavenly by longing and symbolism.
An end, finally, is in sight. Well perhaps not an end, since the pandemic is by no means over, but maybe a beginning. A beginning of a period of relaxation, of reconnection, timed oh so karmically to coincide with the coming of spring. This year, winter felt like a winter within a winter. Nearly a year of masks and isolation and discontent calcified into a proper New England winter, replete with snow drifts and days of brittle cold. We all froze, and we froze alone. Boredom, loneliness, the distant memory of sitting cheerfully at a beloved bar, everything was made worse by the howling of the January wind. Never was spring, a spring of the heart and mind as well as the weather, so sorely needed.
And now it’s on its way. That quick outdoor rendezvous was so welcome that we squeezed in another get together with my cousins the following night. The weather was about to turn again, but we lit the chimanea on our patio and pressed our luck with socially distant pizza. The erstwhile party broke up not long after the sun went down, but now we all had the taste for it again. The typical cold March resumed that night, but it’s inevitably on its way out like the proverbial lamb. Spring is springing.
Yesterday, it was announced that the vaccination roll-out in Connecticut is being sped up, and I could be eligible for my shot by early April. My wife and mother-in-law have already gotten theirs, and once I’m vaccinated our home will know a bit more of a semblance of comfort. I can’t wait. I can’t wait for the return of the most basic of joys, of oysters and beer and bookshops and maybe even a movie in an actual theater. Even a curmudgeon such as myself longs for a little idle chit chat with friends, not over Zoom but over a table full of food.
I think we’re nearly there. I took a walk this morning around the old farm. It’s cold still, but not as bad as it was a day or two ago, and the forecast looks promising. It was a gray morning with no sun, but there was little wind either, and that’s always the telling factor. I wandered up over the hill and back down again to the marsh, and there I crept along till I came to the beaver lodge amidst the reeds. There was a beaver there, having come up from below and broken the thin ice, and the dark brown fellow hardly noticed me as I approached. I stood behind a tree for a good fifteen minutes and watched, neither one of us doing anything of particular interest, but both seemingly happy to be out and about. Redwing blackbirds were singing in the cattails, having only recently returned north themselves. Finally I broke the revery of that marshy moment by trying to sneak closer to the water’e edge, and the beaver splashed down through the ice again and out of sight. He came up once more, farther down the waterway, but I left him to his own business and headed home. As I walked I heard, somewhere overhead, the first killdeer of the season, piping in the sky.
Spring approaches, and behind it, summer. We’ve never been more ready. The long sleep of fear and solitude feels like it might be lifting, and the natural world is here right alongside us with its own display of wakefulness and rejuvenation. The days are growing longer, and filling more and more with sunlight and birdsong. Soon we will gather together again and drink Manhattans on the lawn under the warm blue roof of the sky. Very likely we will have two of them and that will be even better. Possibly we may have three, courting drunkenness perhaps, but still it will be magnificent.
The Edible Complex 