Rock Island, IL

The awning above the west-facing kitchen window is doing what it was made to do as the all-seeing July sun beats our cedar-shake siding like a red-headed step-child. I stand at the sink, looking out the window and down the ravine to the gentle slope near the bottom where last summer, for the last time, a small flat vegetable garden struggled in the encroaching shadows.

Young trees that I don’t want to take out, including a wild cherry, were casting down too many penumbral patterns, and the garden, too much i’th’shade, did poorly to say the least. The woodchucks fattened themselves on what little the ground did produce, though for some reason they left the jalapenos and habaneras untouched, and the retaining wall that held the west edge of the garden was straining mightily to hold what in its younger days it retained with ease and grace and conviction.

So in the spring I removed the long rough timbers, heavy, wet, and rotting, turned the dark crumbly tilth, sloped the ground, and seeded it. The year’s gardening would be done along the south and west sides of the house and in various pots and planters on the deck.

And now, on this summer evening, which could be almost any summer evening, I look out and see the parsley, which is doing well notwithstanding the chubby woodchuck I caught munching away the other day, his proprietary front paws up on the pot and his greedy mouth at work like a fat man’s at an all-you-can-scarf buffet. Woodchucks, at once cocky as point guards and nervous as whores in church, don’t often climb the steps to my back deck. This arrogant fatso did. When I chased him off I discovered a run under my deck. He’s tunneled into the bank and is helping himself to the loot. Bastard!

The oregano is likewise doing well, and the rosemary, the sage, and, of course, the sweet basil.

There’s music on, there’s always music on, and my four-year-old walks into the kitchen, eyes snapping. He drags a stool from the bar-side of the counter, climbs up on it, and watches me. Before he even brings into focus what I’m doing he says, “I smell tomatoes.”

And so he does, for the tomatoes have finally come in, which means that we are now, at long last, in the season of sweet basil, the long warm languid season of sweet basil, when a man can sing along to the Confutatis as he chops fresh onions for sautéing in butter, ruffle the hair of a child underfoot, and suffer in that aromatic space the exquisite pleasures of longing that jab at his aching heart.

“Summertime, O Summertime! Pattern of life indelible,” sang E.B. White, going once more to the lake. “O for the rapturous rebellious days of youth,” said the immortal Binx on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday.

We’ve been eating the basil for some time now, but I can never quite make myself believe that basil is doing its appointed job until the tomatoes are in. And now they are in. They are in and ready to mingle concupiscently with the green and lusty basil. ’Tis the season—the season of sweet basil.

Binx! I see you now! I see you’ve sent down a pattern from above. My eye smarts with a tear of gratitude. This is almost like catching site of a splendid kneecap or that mysterious ridge that runs elegantly between the front and the back of the outer thigh. I’m tempted to believe in God.

Tonight the basil’s appointed job is to grace a slightly toasted French baguette. The bread is in the oven. I chopped the fresh basil and the aromatic tomato as Alison Krauss sang about the steady pace that keeps her steps between those cracks on broadway. Her stride had already kept rhythm to the beat of home sweet home by the time I’d crushed the garlic.

The water is boiling because—did I mention?—the first of the sweet corn has come in too. I take an assertive sip of Knob Creek and quiz my boy on the foods in front of us. He answers passing well, spots the corn, and wants to shuck it. Out the back he goes. There will be no woodchuck tonight if that noisy boy has any say in the matter. God bless the boy and damn the woodchuck.

Our parsley stars in the carbonara I can’t seem to go very long without, especially if I can get the bacon to cook without burning on a hickory fire, and I put our sage in a blue-cheese cream sauce for pasta, a sauce that is the chief cause of my being on a statin right now. Not very sage of me, but wisdom seldom gets the better of pleasure. I like to sprinkle the rosemary on new potatoes, which I slice into discs and broil or grill in olive oil, salt, and pepper. I put the rosemary on right at the end, the last five minutes or so. It’s especially good on purple potatoes done in this way exactly.

But tonight, because we’re officially in the season of sweet basil, it’s basil time, sweet-saint basil time, and the deep green pungent herb is going on my bread, which I now take from the oven, place on a cutting board, turn on its side, and slice lengthwise. In a tin bowl on the counter I’ve mixed the chopped basil, the chopped tomato, the crushed garlic, and the golden olive oil, all of which I now lavish on the bread turned flat-side up. I then slice the long pieces cross-wise, sprinkle on some shredded asagio cheese bought at the farmer’s market from the family of uni-browed cheesemakers (blessed be they), and help myself to the first fruits, or what my dad at his grill calls “chef’s portion,” which is never insubstantial.

God’s body, this is good! The soft tomato against the crunchy bread, the hot garlic awash in olive oil, and there above it all, like an inverted pedal point or a faint obligato, the delicate sweet basil. The sweet sweet basil.

There is nothing like it—okay, there’s one thing like it—and so I toast the season with another hit of the bourbon. Down the lane like an ambrosial ribbon it flutters. These blessed days will last until the summer heat gives way to crisp fall days and the last tomatoes refuse ripen. Not a problem. We’ll fry them green and dying.

And now what is it that the Ozark Mountain Daredevil’s are singing? “Thank you, Lord; you made it right”?

It is; He did.

My son brings the corn in—it’s inexpertly shucked, so I help him finish the job—and into the boil it goes. The only things missing are the other two noisy children and a bronzed woman in a white summer dress. But lo! There she is, coming in from the back with a basket of green beans! How ripe and freshly picked she looks. I pour her a glass of a see-through wine that ought to be a kind of clothing—and which, if it were, I would touch. Do my eyes deceive me, or does she look as if she wants nothing more than to give me one of her long moist lascivious—and promissory—kisses?

She eyes the bourbon, walks past me, and begins washing the beans.

Not to worry. Everything’s alive and throbbing. The Earth has brought forth her increase, we’ve had the salubrious seasons and the seasonable weather we’ve prayed for, and there’s the bosky bite of Kentucky’s noblest export to serenade it all!

Tonight we’ll have a summer feast of vegetables and try our damnedest to be grateful for it—and for everything else. It isn’t always easy to feel worthy of a meal that engages all your senses the way this one will—the light loamy smell of the fresh basil, the fragrant tomato and garlic, the sight of these vivid Christmassy colors mixed together in the bowl, the salty-sweet savor of the sweet corn dripping with salted butter, the feel of the glebe’s own bounty as we wash and handle and prepare it, the sound of my knife on the cutting board and of Ms. Krause and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and the gathering Confutatis.

But gratitude is what’s called for, for soon the shadows will fall hard and touch the air with the chill of death—without which, of course, the season of sweet basil would lack all joy. Tonight it seems impossible that, come autumn, the exquisite pang of longing will smite me more thoroughly than all this, or that in winter it will smite more thoroughly still, but it will. I’m tempted to put on Nine Lessons and Carols. It’s the most wonderful time of the year—for now, for this fleeting Now, this light and musical and airy Now, at once refulgent and weightlessly unbearable.

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