The seasons converge on this warm November day. I have just finished mulching the garlic and planted some shallot and onion sets as part of my annual experiment of overwintering alliums. The latter of these were harvested in high summer as tiny orbs that wouldn't serve well culinarily. The garlic planting has long since replaced my planting Tulip bulbs, which, for me is a ritual that represents active hope. Hope and belief that one will be “around” when they sprout come Spring.

In spite of these Fall preparations, I am about to sit down to a unseasonable lunch--the last salad of the year whose vegetable component is entirely homegrown: an undetected, and thus large cucumber plucked from the vine hours before last week's freeze, a few house-ripened tomatoes that were suspended on the vine, still green, a few weeks back, dill that with prescient wisdom I had oven-dried when the stand of it was forest-like at the beginning of summer, individual portioned sized Red Marble Cippolini onions harvested in the warmth of an August sun, and some slighly frost scorched lettuce that was plucked from the garden in the middle of last week’s snow shower.

The forecast for the next few days promises temperatures that will ease all living things further towards the natural progression of seasons that includes still shorter days and longer nights. But right now, eying this lunch, I revel in the joy of living in a place where there are seasons and am reminded that each one of them give gifts that could not be savored without he passing of the other.