By John Kass

Wednesday February 19, 2025

It’s so cold now in Chicago that the brass monkeys have gone bald in the sensitive parts.

Now they’re outside stupidly shivering, without the sense God gave a fly to come inside and sit by the fire and listen to a story. About the summer and being warm again.

Would you like that kind of story?

I certainly would. As a matter of fact I’ll write it myself. Not all of us can get away for the winter. Betty and I can’t get away. And not all of us can go to Marco Island or Hawaii. Besides, who wants to read a Jack London story about freezing the brass monkeys off when we’re freezing to death? I’ll take a hot buttered rum. Let’s light the fire.

You need a story to make you warm.

Not just about coolish ice-out early spring, not the raw springtime of Holy Week, that season of light overcoats and the first time you held that girl’s hand walking after church so many years ago. Not just warmish enough to play soccer and baseball, but the hot summers of late June and July and August, so hot that the first things your eyes look for is shade.

Summers where the black Midwestern dirt is hot to your bare feet in your own backyard. You know that black dirt. You put it there. You spend hours, days, weeks and months working mushroom compost in there, and throwing out any rocks and clay. It’s soft, loamy now. Welcoming to the foot. Ready to sprout life.

Summer is the sun, and the sweat on your upper lip, on the inside of your hat band, on your lower back under a cotton shirt, clinging there as you tend the vines. There is nothing like the bitter, musky smell of tomato vines that comes from the tiny hairs on the vine and the delicate leaves you may have brushed against.

It smells like the summer that you can barely remember now. With that freeze out there driving summer out of your memory.

Think of the buzz of a June bug in the afternoon. The sound of a screen door slamming. The flick of a robin’s wing as you pull the hose to the garden edge waiting at the fence. That robin knows you. She’s a friend. She’s counting on you. She has a nest nearby.

The sound of water from the hose bubbling into the earth. You never spray the leaves. People who spray the leaves don’t know about gardening. They mean well, but they just don’t know.

You don’t want disease to set in. Just at the roots. Keeping moisture away from the leaves is why some of us use black landscape fabric. The sun hits the fabric and warms the earth. The sun also bounces off the fabric to hit the underside of the leaves to keep them healthy. And if you take time and plan well, water will gather around the base of the vines and then disappear into the ground. I’m looking at an old photo I took of my old garden and of my friend Zeus the Wonder Dog.

I miss you Zeus. You kept the rabbits at bay.

 

 

If you’re out in your garden, watering, that’s when you might just hear a red-winged blackbird, if you’re lucky. And a kid on a lawnmower, a yard or two over. The pause of a squeaky wheel of a baby carriage on the sidewalk, a mom stopping to admire your red knockout roses along the black wrought iron fence. The sound of kids playing. That’s a neighborhood. Without children, it’s just a place to sleep. But children are life and bring life with them wherever they go.

In a few weeks at the good nurseries and green houses, it will be time for them to do the seedling.

In early March a few years ago, it was still raw and cold but I got there on opening day of garden season. A special day of magic: the seeding.

At Vern Goers Greenhouse in Hinsdale, Sandy Buboltz was busy tapping a packet of tiny tomato seeds out into a little aluminum box, tossed these with a handful of fine white sand and began sprinkling it all evenly over small containers of potting mixture.

“When you start tomatoes, you don’t want the seeds clumping up in one place, and the sand helps you control what you’re doing,” Buboltz said.

“And as I’m doing this, I roll each seed off my thumb. If you don’t, you squish the seeds and it all ends up in one blob. So, I go like this, then I go around like this, then do one more time like this, and then do that.”

What warms me are thinking of the names of the tomato varieties, of Box Car Willie, Brandywine Red, Red Zebra and Rutgers, the Romas, the San Marzano, Celebrities and Champion, Chocolate Cherry and Thessaloniki; Better Boys and Early Girls and on and on. The Jet Star. And Abraham Lincoln. The Sweet Cherry 100s. Lemon Boy.

We’ll drive back to Vern Goers this year if they’re still around. I hope so.

Their Thessaloniki tomatoes were just superb. Huge and dense and meaty and perfect for TLB sandwiches, the perfect sandwich on sourdough toast with mayo, and pepper. Goers took good care of their stock. Not like the giant big box hardware places that might water at uneven times. They gave each plant a good watering. You could tell when you’d plant them.

Gardening is an art, yes, but precision is necessary.

Walking past the rows at a greenhouse, you say the names of tomato varieties out loud to yourself. It is like a liturgy. All you need is incense burning.

Even now, so cold, you might remember how it feels walking in your garden barefoot in August, warm dirt between your toes, a cold can of beer in your hand, White Sox baseball on the radio.

The late great Ed Farmer is gone now, so he can’t tell us about his superb curveball at St. Rita. And the Sox unfortunately retired Hawk Harrelson from the television broadcasts, but every year in baseball, like a garden, hope springs eternal.

Our backyard is fenced in, and our vegetable garden is hemmed by granite pavers. In the center of our yard there is a great, perfect tulip tree. It’s so perfect and straight it is one reason I bought the house.

I spit three times to ward off the mati, the evil eye, in case others praise it and the devil wants to hurt it. I spit three times.

Betty loves that tree. So do I.

And under the branches, where the robins build their nest, I’ve put two dark green Adirondack chairs. We sit there and look at the garden.

After the watering and weeding, I might put on some Music of the Baroque, or perhaps Leonard Cohen’s great 1984 song “Hallelujah”.

This cover version made it famous by Jeff Buckley. I think of Cohen writing it on a Greek Island in the summer over the years he worked on it, wrestling with Hallelujah the way all writers struggle with the gods over their songs.

The buzz of the June bugs. A wandering honeybee at the blossoming cucumber vines. The heat of the earth. A woodpecker in the mornings. A blue Jay in the late afternoons.

Betty passing out slices of watermelon, but I’m too old to chase fireflies in the backyard. Still, the Kass boys and their amazing lovely girlfriends will be making Smores at the fire-pit, and my wife and I will look at each other knowingly, so eager for grandchildren. We smile. That’s summer. And I don’t want to go anywhere else.

Warm summer. Home. The beautiful garden And family together.

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

(Copyright John Kass 2025)

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About the author: John Kass spent decades as a political writer and news columnist in Chicago working at a major metropolitan newspaper. He is co-host of The Chicago Way podcast. And he just loves his “No Chumbolone” hat, because johnkassnews.com is a “No Chumbolone” Zone where you can always get a cup of common sense.

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