between extremes

Summers in Washington are, for me, easy to love. The days are long, the berries are plentiful, and the temperatures rise to a pleasant 85 degrees. Sometimes. Summer in Kansas often feels like an endurance test: the ticks, the 100-degree heat, the summer storms of May and June and the searing hot winds of late August. The summer off-sets the endurance test that is a Kansas winter, creating something akin to a balance of extremes. For years, I buffered myself against the cold winds of winter and the summer heat waves by imagining life in a land less mercurial, more temperate in its weather patterns.

Having settled in western Washington, however, the lack of climatic intensity feels odd. Winter was as expected, wet and dark, with the rare bright day counted as an unexpected gift. Spring, though, oh, spring; you caught me unaware. In Kansas, spring is an exuberant, if uneven, extraction from winter's icy grip. Things change. They melt, they give birth, they burst forth. What was once barren, brown, and frozen now heaves with life (often, with insect life), marking a hectic transition from winter to summer. In Washington, spring creeps. It is subtle, the days slowly lengthening, the brighter leaves of deciduous trees filling in the gaps among the evergreens, the shading in of pale new growth at the tips of the Douglas firs and hemlocks. I, the impatient Kansan, frequently missed the cues, my body still attuned to weather patterns over a thousand miles to the east.

people of the south wind

I wonder, as the wet fall weather settles over Washington, how much of homesickness can be attributed to a physiological response to climate and geography. A friend described how her sense of direction was distorted when she left behind mountains and trees; I, on the other hand, haven’t yet learned to read the shifts of elevation and shade in the Northwest, the microclimates introduced by angle and exposure.

After living so long in one place, my eye is not yet accustomed to the unyielding green of Washington’s forests, nor my ear to the sound of wind approaching over mountains and water. Life on the plains is all about the sky, and the mingling of air and moisture over an open expanse of grass. The smell of the weather comes in on the wind: the heavy damp of a gathering thunderstorm, the dull bite of snow-laden wind. The red-gold of fall prairies dulls, by November, to a grayish-dun, under skies a paler, more opaque blue than the brilliance of September and October. One also marks seasons by the wind, and November is when it begins to hurt.

The joke is that Kansans always talk about the weather, and this is often true. We talk about it because tornadoes, blizzards, and adequate rainfall are nothing to be trifled with, but also because it is easier to talk about the weather than to talk about what weather does to us. Farmers remark on the hundredths of an inch that last night’s rainfall left in rain gauges or mention in passing the abnormally hot summer day, but such comments are voiced mainly as statements of the obvious. There is many a Kansan who follows a strict calendar for the use of heating and air conditioning, the observance of which is so ingrained as to become almost a moral code. Living in Kansas tempers expectations; one does not expect routinely fine weather any more than one would hope to find mountain splendors.

Often, when the tug of homesickness sets in, I find myself wishing not that I’d never left Kansas, but that I’d left it long ago, before the place had a chance to take hold.

god bless lawrence, ks

Kansas is not the sort of place most people associate with wild excitement, unless of course you're talking about college basketball. There are nevertheless very good things to be had in Kansas, if one but knows where to look. To mark Kendall's graduation and to celebrate our wedding, two events that took place during the same packed weekend last May, we had dinner at Krause Dining. From the outside, it looks like any other house on a typical East Lawrence street, but the interior is divided between a modern addition and the original nineteenth-century structure; diners can peek in on the kitchen as they move through the spaces. Each aspect of the multi-course meal was well planned and very, very good, but the whole affair remained happily low-key. After dinner, we chatted with the owner on the patio as the soft spring night fell around us; it turns out the couple moved to Kansas from San Francisco in part because they wanted to bike their children to school. All in all, a very Lawrence experience: a little funky, rarely flashy, and completely true to a particular vision.

To end the meal, we were served basil sorbet with candied basil leaves, a dish that prompted many a discussion over the course of the summer. Upon receipt of an ice cream maker as a wedding present, we promptly set out to re-create the dessert. Because I am an advocate of all things made from full-fat dairy products, I couldn't bear the thought of sorbet when ice cream was in the offing; besides, we live in Washington now, where sorbet rarely tastes as good as it does on a hot summer day in Kansas. We adapted a recipe for ice cream, and it is as follows. My candying technique was heavy-handed, so my basil leaves ended up rather sodden; they tasted better than they looked.


Basil Ice Cream with Candied Basil Leaves

For the leaves:
8-10 whole basil leaves
Egg white
Granulated sugar

Lightly beat the egg white, adding a little water if necessary. Lightly coat both sides of each leaf with the egg white, then dip in the sugar. Let air dry for several hours, then use as garnish.

For the ice cream:
1 cup whole milk
2 cups cream
3/4 cup sugar
1 large bunch fresh basil

Heat the milk over medium-low heat with 1 cup of cream and the sugar, just until bubbles form around the edges. Add the basil and let steep for an hour. Strain leaves, then let the mixture chill thoroughly. Add the remaining cup of cream and freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

Variation:
We've also made this ice cream using mint; I was running low on fresh mint leaves, so I substituted about a teaspoon of Morrocan mint tea leaves. It was delicious, with a deeper flavor than the fresh herbs alone.

habitat

Leaving Lawrence was hard, although harder in the imagining than in the doing. When the time came, after the packing and the re-packing and the farewell dinners and errands and tears, I got in the car and headed west. That morning, I did many of the things that were fundamental to my daily routine in Lawrence: I went to Checkers, I walked on Mass Street, I got money out of my local bank. For an occasion that seemed so monumental in my mind, though, these one-last-time events seemed almost as ordinary as they had the week before, somehow strangely lacking in significance.

I dearly love Lawrence, and it was hard to leave, but not necessarily in the ways I’d thought. I miss individual friends, of course, but also the established texture of social life, the patterns, the hangouts, the friend to call for coffee on a Wednesday afternoon and the one for a Saturday morning run. Along with social space, I miss the familiar routines of place, the personal landmarks and learned shortcuts, all the accumulated knowledge of twelve years of inhabiting a place. The way the social and the spatial overlap.

Lawrence is home, but living there felt like unfinished business. Leaving was necessary, but limbo still feels a little daunting.