104 animal, vegetable, miraclewould be asparagus, of course, plus lots of baby lettuces and spinach by
then. Free- range eggs are available here year- round. Our friend Kirsty had
free-range chicken, and the Klings, just a few miles from us, had grass- fed
lamb. The Petersons had strawberries, Charlie had rhubarb, another fam-
ily was making goat cheese. White’s Mill, five miles from our house, had
flour. If we couldn’t pull together a feast out of that, I wasn’t worth the
Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award I won in 1972. (Kind of
by accident, but that is another story.)
The menu wrote itself: Lamb kabobs on the grill, chicken pizza with
goat cheese, asparagus frittata, an enormous salad of spring greens, and a
strawberry-rhubarb crisp. To fill out the menu for vegan friends we added
summer rolls with bean sprouts, carrots, green onions, and a spicy dip-
ping sauce. We had carrots in the garden I had nursed over the winter for
an extra- early crop, and Camille ordinarily grew bean sprouts by the quart
in our kitchen windowsill; she would ramp up her production to a couple
of gallons. We might feed our multitudes after all.
As the RSVPs rolled in, we called farmers to plead for more strawber-
ries, more chickens. They kindly obliged. The week of the party, I cut
from our garden the first three giant heads of Early Comet broccoli—
plants we’d started indoors in February and set out into nearly frozen soil
in March. Without knowing it, I’d begun preparing for this party months
ago. I liked seeing now how that whole process, beginning with seeds,
ending with dinner, fixed me to some deeper than usual sense of hospital-
ity. Anyone who knows the pleasure of cooking elaborately for loved ones
understands this. Genesis and connection with annual cycles: by means
of these, a birthday could be more than a slap on the back and jokes about
memory loss.
On Tuesday, four days pre- party, Camille and I hoed weeds from
around corn seedlings and planted ten hills of melons for some distant,
future party: maybe we’d have corn and cantaloupe by Lily’s birthday in
July. By dusk the wind was biting our ears and the temperature was falling
fast. We hoped the weather would turn kinder by this weekend. We ex-
pected well over a hundred people—about thirty spending the weekend.
Rain would wreck any chance for outdoor dancing, and camping in the
yard would be grim. We scowled at the clouds, remembering (ruefully)