good morning ~

(click the link / tulips to listen)

My Big Breakbut all manner of seasons are brief if they bring about some sweetness.

today’s track follows what I would consider to be a classic Ben Seretan musical structure - a gesture in two halves, sweet and nice for the first half, then a heaven-emulating drone that verges on a little terrifying in the back half

mentioned this last week but tomorrow night John Thayer and I are bringing the sunbeam duo to Tubby’s in Kingston, looking forward to seeing some of you there :)

In the distance across the highway I hear the rubber-on-rubber call of the eastern grey tree frogs. We barreled right through peeper time this year, only heard them on a handful of evenings in the past couple of months, whereas last year they went nutty for weeks, we would drive by a neighbor's pond and roll down the windows, a driveby frogging. So everything is a little different from day to day and then also a little different from year to year. As the wind of time's passage wears down the whorls of my lifeline I become a hyper specific this place almanac.

I don't think I ever fully grasped how aggressively seasonal the world is until we moved to this place three years ago. I grew up with a kind of smeary sameness in southern California - most days are mostly similar there, though I do remember a particularly spirited El Niño season in third grade or so, but I think that had more to do with my walking home from school that year and potentially experiencing the rain more directly. When I moved to the east coast when I went to college of course I felt pretty viscerally that the days got shorter and that, you know, snow could fall. Like many things I savored in college, I had not had firsthand experience with that phenomenon directly until I got to Connecticut. But for many years I tried to pretend that my habits, obligations, and tendencies should endure unchanged right through the profound moods of the calendar. I think, in particular, of my time working a very regimented desk job in my last years in New York City - I had to stay in the building until 6pm Monday through Friday whether or not that meant leaving work long after the sun had set. Similarly, I had a really specific food shop / prep thing I was doing back then. I would eat the same fifteen or so items from the grocery store with dogged devotion almost every single day and it did not occur to me to really lean in and analyze what it really meant to buy cherry tomatoes, arugula, and quinoa when they were profoundly out of local season. Which is funny, because I had definitely already experienced the singular joy of fresh foodstuffs from less than 100 miles away many times (the first time I ever bit into a groundcherry from the Union Square farmer's market stands out). But in my tightly regimented life as a treadmill-obsessed desk monkey I saw seasonality more as a challenge to overcome - an obstacle that could not stop me from running twenty miles a week, from arriving at 9:30am on the dot each day - rather than something that in ways both subtle and profound underlined the hourglass sands slipping through our meager little fingers.

June brings the long days, July the delightful waft of firework smoke when the next town over does their little municipal pyrotechnic display. Cucumbers and county fairs, fucking off from computer to go swimming. Tomato sandwiches in August, the tugboat roundup the first weekend in September. Up here that's when it really gets ya - the nasturtiums are still completely overwhelming and you're eating them two meals a day and you think this might be the year that summer lasts forever. But then the first chill, the leaves change, the apples get really good. Then in November you realize not much is happening outdoors, that the luscious quiet that surrounds your home for the green part of the year is suddenly punctured - you can hear the cars on the highway by your house a lot louder now, no tree canopy in the way and plus they've got on their snow tires now. The vividness recedes and amid the accumulation of snow you think about sitting in the shadow of your friend's sculpture on your front lawn as the slip of sun grazes past it just to get a little color on your irises.

My wife is karmically linked to asparagus and as such her (now in its third year quite bountiful) garden is very much oriented in growing as many nubbly stalks as she can each year (a quick botanical aside: did you know that when you let them go to flower they produce these hilarious bushy little trees that look a yellowy cross between the sad Christmas tree from Charlie Brown and one of those plastic Bodies exhibit preservations of lung bronchioles? Also, asparagus is considered a rhizomatous perennial, which means that it will come back year after year, strengthening its root network and sending up exponentially more shoots each year). Over the past couple months we have been blessed with many beautiful meals of seared, buttery asparagus lightly salted and lightly lemoned - less than ten minutes and two hundred footfalls from garden bed to plate, absolute perfection (and ya for sure our pee do be smelling crazy). But listening to the grey treefrogs and thinking about how the peepers were their local openers I am lead down the path to some astounding math. Here we go. I'm turning 38 this year (that's not the astounding part but I am astounded). Lord willing I will live at least that many years again. And buddy I am just not content with experiencing a mere 38 more six-or-so week periods of premium asparagus harvest. I want to hear the peepers starting up for more than 38 more times. I want to see those first crocuses pop out a hundred times over. Same for the first good sled after the first hearty snowfall - I want to hoot down the hill as often as able. I want to kiss my sweetie at the stroke of midnight on a thousand more new year's eves (even when, as we were this year, sick as dogs at the edge of the world). But all manner of seasons are brief if they bring about some sweetness.

But what about you? How many peaceful evenings admiring the frog calls you got left on this crazy treadmill we call Earth? What is the one seasonal delight that keeps the wick of your candle lit?