Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Bounty of Summer
In this wonderful and healthful routine that Peter and i have been doing now for a couple of weeks - getting out of the apartment right early in the morning and taking a rigorous walk in Riverside Park for a good half-hour - we turn down Broadway to head home from the Park.
Part of the routine is to stop at Starbuck's for two reviving iced Americanos (they have already gotten quite used to us there, and seem to know our orders by heart)...and then we continue on down Broadway, next stopping only to buy our fresh fruit for breakfast.
Summer's bounty: fresh watermelon and sweet red raspberries (for a mere 5$ for four containers of enormous berries)! We have been gorging on the sweetest melons and berries, and, along with a slice or two of this amazing whole-grain bread we found delivered by Fresh Direct, we enjoy a leisurely time together at our dining room table before our days begin. I do believe watermelon is the perfect food: luscious tasting, filled with water and sweetness, lovely to gently crunch into, and deeply satisfying in the mouth. The fact that it has little or no nutritional value notwithstanding, I still think it is perfect. Filling too! I've loved watermelon ever since I was a kid, and i still do.
In Atlanta, when I was an elementary school tyke, there was a fruit stand on the way home from E. Rivers School, and in the summer, the man who owned it would open up a large open side-porch for the express purpose of selling, cutting and serving enormous slices of watermelon to his customers...at leat they seemed enormous to my young appetite...with vinyl covered tables, large enough for whole families, we eager eaters, we salacious sloshers of the watery fruit, could sprinkle salt on the red mouthy slices (from the shakers he placed on the table for that very purpose), and sit right down and eat them there...oh! The sticky, sweet mess...the feeling of summer....that sweet stickiness so easily washed off by the garden hose ...perfect mess and perfect clean and perfect abandon...nothing more sensuous. And the salt made the sweet so much sweeter....an early life lesson. In those days, the melons still had big black seeds, and we were told to carefully negotiate our way around them, so as not to swallow them: some implicit threat that if we did, watermelons would grow in our tummies like babies....so, boy oh boy, did we spit out those seeds! Sometimes spitting them...sometimes carefully extracting them through the mush...sometimes picking them out before putting the chunk of melon in our mouth....later even crunching them, since the discovery was that they actually tasted pretty good. I even heard tell of people who brewed tea out of them to heal kidney ailments!
But these days, we need bother with no such obstacles: the melons, more often than not, come having had their seeds bred out of them! Now what fun is that? Well, of course, it's great, since all you need to do now is crunch and slop, and slosh and crunch some more, letting the cool red mushy mess slide down before taking another huge mouthful! BUT: i do miss the look of those shine black ovals dotting the red landscape of the grinning slice....something wrong, really, with a seedless watermelon...too urbanized...too engineered...too darned easy! But, modern times demand streamlining, speed and ease, so bye-bye seeds!
Nevertheless: the bounty of this particular summer - this summer of NYC, Peter , the pups and me, together in a life that pleases...the bounty includes early morning walks, together breakfasts, and, yes, summer's bounty: watermelon and raspberries, a color-coded treat treat of Nature. Mmmmmm good.
Part of the routine is to stop at Starbuck's for two reviving iced Americanos (they have already gotten quite used to us there, and seem to know our orders by heart)...and then we continue on down Broadway, next stopping only to buy our fresh fruit for breakfast.
Summer's bounty: fresh watermelon and sweet red raspberries (for a mere 5$ for four containers of enormous berries)! We have been gorging on the sweetest melons and berries, and, along with a slice or two of this amazing whole-grain bread we found delivered by Fresh Direct, we enjoy a leisurely time together at our dining room table before our days begin. I do believe watermelon is the perfect food: luscious tasting, filled with water and sweetness, lovely to gently crunch into, and deeply satisfying in the mouth. The fact that it has little or no nutritional value notwithstanding, I still think it is perfect. Filling too! I've loved watermelon ever since I was a kid, and i still do.
In Atlanta, when I was an elementary school tyke, there was a fruit stand on the way home from E. Rivers School, and in the summer, the man who owned it would open up a large open side-porch for the express purpose of selling, cutting and serving enormous slices of watermelon to his customers...at leat they seemed enormous to my young appetite...with vinyl covered tables, large enough for whole families, we eager eaters, we salacious sloshers of the watery fruit, could sprinkle salt on the red mouthy slices (from the shakers he placed on the table for that very purpose), and sit right down and eat them there...oh! The sticky, sweet mess...the feeling of summer....that sweet stickiness so easily washed off by the garden hose ...perfect mess and perfect clean and perfect abandon...nothing more sensuous. And the salt made the sweet so much sweeter....an early life lesson. In those days, the melons still had big black seeds, and we were told to carefully negotiate our way around them, so as not to swallow them: some implicit threat that if we did, watermelons would grow in our tummies like babies....so, boy oh boy, did we spit out those seeds! Sometimes spitting them...sometimes carefully extracting them through the mush...sometimes picking them out before putting the chunk of melon in our mouth....later even crunching them, since the discovery was that they actually tasted pretty good. I even heard tell of people who brewed tea out of them to heal kidney ailments!
But these days, we need bother with no such obstacles: the melons, more often than not, come having had their seeds bred out of them! Now what fun is that? Well, of course, it's great, since all you need to do now is crunch and slop, and slosh and crunch some more, letting the cool red mushy mess slide down before taking another huge mouthful! BUT: i do miss the look of those shine black ovals dotting the red landscape of the grinning slice....something wrong, really, with a seedless watermelon...too urbanized...too engineered...too darned easy! But, modern times demand streamlining, speed and ease, so bye-bye seeds!
Nevertheless: the bounty of this particular summer - this summer of NYC, Peter , the pups and me, together in a life that pleases...the bounty includes early morning walks, together breakfasts, and, yes, summer's bounty: watermelon and raspberries, a color-coded treat treat of Nature. Mmmmmm good.
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