Summer is spent. Last weekend while laborers celebrated we headed to a small island in the great lake Erie, a stone’s skip from the Canadian border. Our oh-so-small family was gathering for a reunion.
Me, Kat (my youngest daughter) and our dog Tula crossed the waters to the island, coy as they are, in the 11th hour summer sunshine. On the other side my sister retrieves us from the ferry dock and we drive to the far tip of the island to her new lake house. Tula, a bordercollie-huskie mix we rescued at the age of six months, has never seen a lake in all her 5 years on this planet whose surface is 75% water. So I am curious to see her reaction. React she does. She springs from the car spots the lake, and without a nanosecond’s hesitation runs flat out across the lawn, flies off the seawall into the waters and swims straight ahead as if her next stop is Canadian soil. Crazy. I stare, sun in my eyes, in disbelief and fascination. Into my reverie comes my niece’s voice, “she sure loves the water ... is she part portugese water dog or somethin' ... does she always swim that far out?” Before I can explain that she has never even seen a lake and as far as I know she has no water dog heritage (but I am now left wondering exactly who she really is) I am jarred by the reality that she might just keep going till she is simply too tired to swim. Suddenly anxious I call out her out her name and by some other hardwired instinct she turns and swims back,rolls in dead fish on the shore and bounds towards me.
The rest of the weekend was family fun; tubing, kayaking, biking, and gaming, all punctuated by lots of eating and lively political serial monologues that passed for discussions. It was hard to leave behind the sun, sand and stars at the end of it. That we were leaving summer was evident in the slant of the sun on the water we crossed. But home meant hooking up with the rest of my nuclear family – husband, Wayne, and Lizzie, my older daughter, who is visiting. Lizzie is coming home after a grand graduation trip with a purpose. For under a thousand dollars she traveled the rails across the US and Canada for 30 days. During those 30 days she made her way to San Francisco for a prison reform conference and then on to Portland and Vancouver to look at graduate schools. Then a long ride back through the Canadian Rockies, where she stopped to hike in Jasper, and then back home. I am excited to learn what she has learned.
The short work week felt anything but. Here it is Saturday morning, and there is a fall feel to the air; another summer over, another year older. And the world seems colder in spite of the predictions of warming. I cannot head to the pool and lap away the mantle of melancholy that is settling on my shoulders.
My morning amble through the garden revealed little in the way of tomatoes but the basil plants are bordering on bushes. Pesto! I will make buckets of pesto on this fallish day. Summer harvested and frozen, to be thawed and eaten over steaming pasta in the chill of January.
The recipe for pesto is my own variation on the traditional. I supplement with spinach because when my daughters were small an all basil pesto was too strong in taste for their tiny tongues and spinach just enriched the vitamins and minerals they would be getting.
Today I spread a thick icing of pesto on some great Italian bread and topped it with turkey and avocado slices. Melancholy be gone.
Jayne's Pesto
4 cups washed basil and spinach leaves (I generally use equal parts of each)
2 large cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons walnuts
¼ cup parmesan cheese
Sea salt (to taste)
1/8 cup Virgin organic olive oil (more if you like your pesto less dry)
Turkey Pesto Sandwich
2 slices bread of choice
1 tablespoon pesto
2 slices of turkey
A slice of avocado
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