My appreciation for most summer produce borders on veneration. If I close my eyes, even in the winter months, I can still conjure their more sensual qualities in my mind: the glossy curves of a tomato, the velvety weight of a peach, the way a perfectly ripe blackberry pops between teeth, leaving a sweet, inky stain on the tongue. Never once had I dreamt of yellow squash.
I don’t quite know when I developed the notion that yellow summer squash, with its tender skin and watery flesh, was dull, but that opinion stuck with me for quite a while. At least a few times every June or July, I’d buy some out of a sense of duty towards seasonal cooking, only to let them languish in my crisper drawer until their exterior was no longer taut and I’d have to hurriedly make use of them. The results, as you might imagine, were never great. There were far too many sautéed slices that went limp when they hit the plate, far too many “I’ll just wing it!” plays on ratatouille.
Those who love summer produce insist, often with some fanaticism, that it doesn’t require much effort to transform their favorites into something that is almost transcendent. I often join their annual chorus: Give me lightly-salted tomato slices between white bread with a little spread of Duke’s. Give me a nectarine that is screaming to simply be eaten over the basin of a kitchen sink.
I think I somewhat resented yellow summer squash because, unlike its seasonal compatriots, it seemingly took too long to turn it into just . . . something.
But this was the summer that everything changed because this was the summer nothing felt easy.
I’m not sure if it was the multi-year pandemic, the crushing loss of bodily autonomy, or as Salon Food contributor Maggie Hennessy once put it, “ire about unfettered capitalism.” I realized around mid-June, however, that I didn’t feel quite like myself.
For weeks, a thick cloud of humidity hung in my apartment. No matter how many fans I strategically positioned or how often I futzed with the windows, the hot air just wouldn’t move. It was an omnipresent representation of the stasis I felt all around me.
Friends and acquaintances and folks I follow on Instagram were all seemingly unburdened by it. They were busy drinking gorgeous little cocktails, lying out at the shore or posting photo dumps from Italy. (I swear, half of America is in Italy right now.)
“Summer should be easy,” I texted a friend.
“You’re burned out,” she said. “And you’ll stay burned out because you don’t even know how to take a weekend.”
She was right, of course. I was burned out. I am burned out. Coming of age at a time when side gigs were a given and hustle was a virtue, I’m great at telling those I love …….
