Always a favorite place of mine. The first stop is always the tavern to see many old friends and my brother. It doesn’t take a lot of beers to get caught up on what’s going on in Yakima, as things move pretty slow here.
Jo and Ken were in the SW with their motorhome last winter. They had sold the tavern where we gather at and bought the RV a few years ago, and we’ve been chatting about the lifestyle since then. After this winter they decided to sell the house and go fulltime, so our chats went very serious into details tonight. Good fun.
I was relieved to see the field next to where I park planted in corn and not mint. Oh, it’s a hot summer night and mint is the air, but not strong enough to dusrupt sleeping. Hops aren’t bad, and just a tad of apple is in the air. Corn, mint, hops, apple, those are smells of a hot summer night in Yakima. I grew up here and associate these smells with the seasons, the temperatures, and the activities of the farming community in the valley. And my life.
Tomorrow morning I’ll do what I do ever since I’ve had a driver’s license and go wandering through the valley. And when I see a decent winery stop in and give it a taste, maybe buy a few bottles. Grab some fresh-picked corn for dinner, and a sack of tomatoes, the kind that actually have flavor, can’t be shipped, and when you bite into them they squirt everywhere and end up on your shirt no matter what you do. Need a melon for breakfast, my advice is to buy the ugliest melon you can find. Green Valley, Utah has the ugliest and best tasting melons in the country, but Yakima is a close second. Ugly equals good taste.
Buy ugly, and eat local.