summer?

the widening of the year is upon us. warmth we can count on, here, up high. loops and wedges of light that anchor into the late hours of the day. the land calls out to be walked, who are we to deny it?

the rest of the country has had this balm for weeks - maybe months - by now.  but here, in the high desert, this recent coming of Real Summer is bracing, resplendent in a shameless green that surprises us all. every year.

the Wasatch Range bears many small towns on its shoulders. there are rewards for bracing the parched and crackling sunbeat meadows, for skating up talus slides and leaning the many levers of your body against sharp inclines. at the tops of mountains, meekness falls away (though a sense of smallness prevails.) from the fingertips of the  folded palm summits, if you can bear to be up in the winds, you can make sense of all the seemingly mysterious and aimless back roads that you ease the lumbering station wagon along in the valleys. this kind of whippy, radiant clarity, is empowering while we ride on aching legs up to make sense of our homey spaces.

in early June we still are not free of killing frosts- that strange phenomenon that renders the more tender plants glossy and transparent as the cell walls collapse and light moves through them with ease. commonly we are out on balconies and in fresh furrows tucking tablecloths and woolen scarves over the very young and the very green.

often in the mornings scales of water ice the back grasses, rigid and fierce. 

and, as a result, there comes with this warm greening of the world, a profound sense of preciousness. this is why, i think, we are deeply wired to misunderstand the glut of green in the coastal places, the lowland places.

how foreign to have an endless supply of fecundity. here, instead, there is a glut of brilliance, light, space and moving air. the mountain people, perhaps, are imbued with an airier, more ethereal constitution. more frivolity. less rooting and firmness. it is we who load up on the metally trinkets of the climbing trade and attempt to fasten ourselves to the very high and exposed rocky walls of our wild citadels without lingering on that sport's impracticality. we wade up through the snowfields on skis and then slide back down, slicing up the crystal structure as we go by and dodging death, speedily, if we can. we who clamber through the desert with loads on our backs to spend days at a time up to our chests in river water, inspecting the wet and foreign lives of fish and heron.

but this is a ramble.

more to the point is that the mountain world is in its giving place again. it is time to break out shears and baskets and go harvesting in the gluey late light of a forest glade inlaid with bluebells and pricking poisons.
as last year this potion was made, i am fittingly at the end of my store and need to re-up.

but one thing i have not done is use the nettles in their fresh green glory. (partially because, perhaps, i am still too nervous to consider eating such prickly fare.) but i am bolstered, as always, by posts like this. so it is a good weekend experiment to test out the generosity of the land. among other ways, of course.