Spike is Best

What a glorious night! The windows are wide open. I came back from a walk and the September gusts, unusually warm for a coastal B.C. night, have brought indoors the fragrance of the first dead and dried leaves being scattered out there, everywhere. The place smells like freshly cured tobacco leaves. What a strange thing: freshly cured. 

Labour Day is not the end of summer. Because summer is not constituted of vacationing from labour (or schooling). This is probably my favourite time of year. The cottonwoods sing about something brilliantly alive behind the blue of the sky. Some people are all eager for pumpkin spice instead of bright blue death - the weirdos. The grass is still mostly gold, except for those weirdos who insist on keeping their patches green. Peaches are still coming in from the Okanagan. And the apples, the hoards of apples sending the brix meters off the charts. Those chojuro pears! What a strange thing: crisp and juicy.

My Wicksons are small this year because I didn't thin them, but goodness, they are the best apples I've ever tasted. How can one describe the Wickson? That malty champagne burst when you bite into it - how can one bitch about the size of the apple when it sends your salivary glands for such a wild trip? When you think salivary glands, you might think sour. It's not sour that does it. It's something else, and it's definitely full-on sweet, and if you can describe it, then you're a good writer.

If you're growing beefsteak tomatoes without cover in the Fraser Valley, this season is turning out to be the idyll. The Fraser Valley is a notoriously difficult climate to ripen a good amount of beefsteaks to perfection on the vine. People often opt for cherry types. You can set a huge crop of beefsteaks, no problem, but getting them to ripen is the challenge. This season is not offering a challenge. For this Surrey native, it's pure magic.

My Dad died on a sunny summer September morning, almost a decade ago. And it was like the summer died all on in one day - though it didn't. The last thing he built was a solid foursquare wood frame, stapled with plastic, to protect the beefsteak tomatoes I was growing in the backyard. We were thinking of some weeks ahead, yet that very afternoon, right after we placed the mobile 'greenhouse' over the tomato vines, there was a terrific downpour; the first great rain you get after the long west coast drought.

My Dad stood at the kitchen window and he kept saying, "We built that shelter just in time!" He kept repeating this. He said it three times.

 "We built that shelter just in time!"