I love thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills

Yesterday, we came to New Hampshire for the weekend. I drove us here, because this is the summer when I will finally get my driver’s license – I am determined. I did all right, although I’m still fine-tuning my steering technique, and I got honked at in a roundabout for being daft. After being a passenger all my life, it’s refreshing to be honked at for being daft. For decades, I’ve made fun of other drivers from the safety of the passenger seat, exactly in the spirit of a non-soccer-playing fan opining on the World Cup. It served me right to be honked at. Once I’d threaded my way out of the roundabout, I pulled over to the right with my blinker on and let five cars go by me, feeling the presence of karma in the hot, humid air.

Finally, I pulled our old algae-colored Subaru into the spot in front of the barn, put the car in Park, and turned off the engine, having successfully completed the single longest drive (an hour and a half, with a quick stop at Hannaford, during which I practiced parking and unparking) of my life. Dingo mooed with excitement until we let him out of the car; this is his favorite place on earth, as far as we can tell.

As we carried groceries and bags toward the house, we saw the view of Dundee Mountain’s lush green slopes, just past the barn, tiger lilies in the foreground – I think I might have made a little happy mooing sound of my own. We haven’t been here since March. We came into the house, which was stuffy and smelled faintly of wood smoke, and went around opening curtains and windows, stowing our stuff, putting groceries away, looking out the windows at the mountains, the unmown fields, the familiar landscape so radically changed from the black-and-white sepia-tinged scene of ice and snow of a few months ago.

After we’d eaten a quick lunch of leftover black lentil salad with the pickled jalapenos, red onion, and radishes I’d made to go with chicken tacos last week (a winning combination), we put on our bathing suits and set off toward the lake. We turned off the dirt road onto the steep path to Brendan’s aunt’s dock, walking downward through clouds of blackflies and mosquitos. At the lake, we stripped off our clothes and ran to the end of the dock and plunged into the clean, chilly-then-warm water, which was full of little wavelets and covered with a thin scrim of pollen.

Dingo plumped himself down on the dock and watched us, and then, once we’d swum away, he retreated to the shrubbery, where I could see his triangular head and bat ears as he spied on us through the shifting leaves; he won’t swim, no matter how hot it gets. He used to bark at us to come back whenever we went into the water, but in recent years, he’s evidently become resigned to our demented behavior. Now he just sighs with disapproval to himself from a distance.

By the time we got back to the house, we were hot all over again. The afternoon stretched out, the haze deepening, the heat baffling our ears like sound insulation. We took cool showers and dressed in as little as possible and tried not to move. As the sun went down and we got hungry, we tried to imagine what we could possibly want to eat on such a day.

“I know,” said Brendan. “I have the perfect thing.”

He put a big pot of water on the stove and poured us each a small glass of rioja with several ice cubes. When the water boiled, he plunged ten medium-sized ripe tomatoes into it for three or four minutes, until their skins split, then he took them out and peeled (but did not seed) them. Meanwhile, he peeled and chopped a heap of garlic.

In a deep skillet, he poured some of the olive oil retrieved from the stash of bottles in the cupboards over the fireplace; it comes from his family’s olive trees in Tuscany, and it’s the best I’ve ever had, and every time I eat it, I feel insanely lucky.

I sipped my wine and spaced out, looking out at the mountains, while Brendan sautéed the garlic for a scant minute, then added the chopped tomatoes along with all their juice and some salt and pepper and a smidgen of crushed red pepper. He let the sauce cook down for twenty minutes or so until it thickened, then added a handful of chopped fresh basil at the very end.

He tossed the sauce with a pound of gluten-free penne rigate, made from rice and imported from Italy (Rustichella d’Abruzzo, but Le Veneziane, or really any gluten-free pasta from Italy, is also incredibly good).

While he threw together a simple salad, I poured us some more rioja and added ice. We sat at the table in the pressing heat and devoured everything with moans of pleasure until the pasta dish was empty and all I could do was run a finger along its bottom to dredge up every molecule of that sweet, savory, beautiful sauce.

After dinner, cool air started to blow in with far-off thunder and lightning. The storm was slow in coming, and its approach was dramatic. We went outside and watched from the porch as the darkening sky became saturated with electricity, echoing booms of rolling thunder and white-hot lightning cascading through the high clouds, blinding explosions of streaking brachioles of light that illuminated everything for several beats then faded. Over the fields, fireflies were winking and glinting.

When the hair on our arms prickled from the combined chill and electric charge in the air, we figured we’d better go in. We turned off all the lights and went into the downstairs bedroom and sat in the bay window seat, watching the light show, gasping like theatergoers at a great production of “The Tempest.”