Is Spring Here?

Normally, March is not grilling weather. However, this weekend has been much more like summer than it has been like the last weeks of winter. We’ve had temperatures in the 70s; today’s high was 78 and yesterday was just a few degrees lower. That’s unusual for this part of Virginia in March.

Most years I get a “feeling,” a “sense” that spring has begun. It’s kind of like a tingling inside, a sort of personal vernal equinox that ignores the calendar. That hasn’t happened yet this year, but my feeling isn’t always exactly the start of good weather and warming temperatures.

Anyway, my wife and I have a big job clearing leaves from around the home place this spring. The fall weather didn’t help much. Between obligations and weather, I just wasn’t able to get the year’s leaf production cleaned up. We have a blue-million leaves that take over every fall. The house is surrounded on three sides—the longest two sides, and one of the short sides—by leaf-bearing trees. The people that we bought the house from, the ones that built it, managed to incorporate every conceivable, and most devious leaf-catching devices known to man. Clearing them usually takes some 25-30 hours of manual labor. This year, I was able only to get about eight hours in before the bad weather came to stay for a while.

But we each spent a couple of hours Saturday, and I spent another two-to-three today, and was able to get the deck cleared enough that I could get to the grills. An afternoon rain both stopped the leaf-clearing project and cooled the day down into the mid-60s.

The menu consisted of lemon pepper chicken, asparagus, grilled herbed potato slices, sourdough toast on the grill, and blueberry-lemon cake. Very good. All of it.

So the grilling season is open. Bon appetite!