Asparagus Season
I came home the May after first year university, without a job and with a lot of mixed feelings.
I came home for the summer because it was expected—by me, by my parents, and my boyfriend. The program at his university ran year-round, but he came back to our hometown on weekends, or I’d go visit him where he lived with an elderly aunt who was both landlady and boozy chaperone.
I came home because I hadn’t yet found a way to say that I didn’t want to. I hadn’t even realized it yet.
I’d only been back three or four days before I was being woken by my parents reminding me I needed to go out and find work. It wasn’t just a hedge against idleness. Making money was a necessity for me to return to university. So I took the only job I could find, and the last one I wanted.
I went to pick asparagus.
Despite growing up in a rural area, and having played in friends’ dairy barns and spent time in stables, I’d never worked an agricultural job. I didn’t know anything about asparagus beyond the taste, and what Line you might drive up to buy it.
Everything was a revelation.
Early every morning, seven of us would take our seats low to the ground on a picker that went over the rows like a biplane that never took off. The crew leader sat in the middle seat, and worked the controls with her feet, and all of us forward over the soil, snapping (or cutting) the asparagus spear by spear. The engine was too loud to carry on much of a conversation. We spent hours just looking at the ground.
I loved it.
Fifteen years of ballet training had left me flexible enough to hinge at the hip, instead of hunch over. The noise of the engine made conversation uncomfortable, if not impossible, and sitting on the end of the machine, I soon realized that there was nothing for it but to let my thoughts unfurl. Sometimes they were as looping as our trips up and down the rows. Other times, I heard lines in my head or made up stories. Things I should have gone home and written down.
Then there was the asparagus itself. It seemed magical. That it could grow in such sandy soil. That it came and went so quickly—just a few weeks in May and June. But most of all because every day we would pick the same field. By the afternoon, the field would be picked nearly back to the dirt. And in the morning, the asparagus would be there again. Grown up overnight like the Never Tree in Peter Pan.
When my mother was a student, she worked at a chocolate factory—a job that left her unable for years to touch a Hershey’s product. But I never fell out with asparagus. I didn’t pick asparagus again—after that summer, I never lived at home—but my love endures.
It’s such a short season. Gone, before you know it.
P.S. The Not-at-All Gourmet Way to Enjoy Asparagus—with cheese sauce on toast
(Content warning: gluten, so much dairy, a total lack of sophistication, and a photo that will never show up in a magazine.)
I cook it in all kinds of other ways now, but this how I learned to appreciate asparagus. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
I still make it once a year in celebration. Tricks for maximum delight: homemade cheese sauce (Does this need more cheese? Yes, it always needs more cheese…right, Gen?), homemade bread, salt and pepper, and asparagus steamed till just tender.
You’re welcome.