March

The jar said Smuckers jelly on the lid and it was covered in a frosty haze. Underneath a lively green began to show through as it thawed during the day. March holds the possibility of green, if not the grass at least we have St Patrick's Day when even the beer and the Chicago river turn green. There may be a surprising t-shirt day, but more likely there will be a surprising 8 inches of snow day. But this jar held our first, and maybe only, green of March.

We picked up the batch of basil from a farm in Sun Prairie toward the end of the summer when the ripe tomatoes dripped sweet juice, all over, as I tried to cut them up, cook them, freeze them, somehow save them before they rotted or froze or we tired of their sticky sweet. The tomatoes seemed a nuisance compared to the basil. I froze the tomatoes knowing we would use them often, but I also knew they would lose most of their taste. But the basil was different. It needed just to be chopped and mixed up with other happy ingredients: pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese, a little salt. A few whirrs of the food processor and wha-la, we have pesto. The harder part was putting it in jars and forgetting about it so that we could surprise us with its warm reminders of summer on some long winter night.

Most of the jars are long gone. I don't think one has never made it this long. Maybe it was our new freezer that is low to the ground so I don't see things in the door (there was also a can of frozen lemonade sitting next to the pesto). Or maybe I had been saving it long enough I actually did forget about it because we bought some from Trader Joe's a few weeks ago. But tonight when Dietrich wanted pesto pizza and Elliott wanted pesto noodles (this is as close to consensus as we ever arrive, save Chipotle), there it was in the door, waiting to be thawed, spread on carbohydrates, and savored.

I've been mourning the end of winter. I know this won't last for long and soon I will be as ready as everyone else to see it go. But the snow has been our playground for the past three months and I'm sorry to see it going. But this taste of summer tonight, on the first day of March, reminded me how sweet the summer is. How good it tastes, how warm the sun feels on my back after a winter of being layered down. How the trees drape over our house, how the lake laps easily on the beach. I am sad to see the winter go, though I doubt it has had its last word. But I'm grateful to be reminded of the life to come by this jar of pesto that has sat quietly in the freezer door these long months.