Sunburnt and Sweet: A Midsummer Love Letter to Vermont

July in Vermont hums with old rhythms. Blueberry bushes are heavy with fruit, just as they’ve been for centuries. First for the Abenaki, then for settlers who learned to gather, boil, preserve. Cornfields rustle in the breeze, tall and tasseled, echoing the wisdom of the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) planted together for strength. Zucchini spill from backyard plots like an inside joke between gardeners, while tomatoes swell with heat, not quite ready, but nearly. 

These are the weeks when the land gives too much, too fast. When kitchens fill with steam and fruit flies, when jam bubbles on the stove and someone is always grating something into a batter. The season doesn’t last, and maybe that’s the point: midsummer reminds us what it means to eat with the calendar, not the clock.

Wild Fruit, Mild Effort 

The blueberries come home each day in a little green paperboard basket, still warm from the sun and smelling like the edge of a woodshed. Kind of sweet, a little wild, always fleeting. My youngest picks them, a few hours at a time at a nearby private plot. It’s the kind of quiet midsummer job that feels like it belongs to another century.. And yet, instead of preserving them in jars or baking them into a blueberry buckle, I mostly just stand at the counter and eat them by the handful, still dusty with bloom and barely bothering to rinse. No flair. No nod to my ancestors.

Which is unfair, really, because my mother made blueberry everything. Muffins, especially. The domed kind with crisp tops and soft, steaming centers, always just the right amount of burst fruit. She had a feel for muffins and for the way batter should look before it bakes. I never inherited that, exactly. Last summer I tried to make blueberry jam and failed spectacularly, ending up with a sticky mess that was neither spreadable nor shelf-stable. It scared me off trying again, even though I still dream of opening a jar mid-January and tasting July.

Blueberries, of course, have long been part of this land’s memory. The Abenaki harvested wild berries from lowbush fields. These dry, acidic places where little else would grow. They dried them, boiled them, mixed them with cornmeal or meat. Settlers, too, came to rely on blueberries for flavor and winter nutrition, tucked into pies or simmered down into spoon-sweets. And here I am, with my paper container and stained fingers, a little feral about it all. Maybe that’s its own kind of tradition.

Butter, Salt, and Sacred Things 

We don't take corn lightly in my family. When summer hits its peak and the days start to feel like they might be slipping through our fingers, we start watching Facebook. Not for events or updates, but for one sacred post: Pete’s Stand in Walpole has corn. That announcement carries more weight than any breaking news. It means the season has turned, the fields have yielded, and dinner plans are about to shift accordingly.

At its best, summer corn demands center stage. Entrees sit cooling on plates while we pass ears of it down the table, dripping with salted butter, leaving trails on fingers, chins, even the tablecloth. If the corn is really good we don’t need anything else. Sweet and toothsome and boiled just right, it’s eaten with reverence and abandon, sometimes both at once. No t-shirt or tablecloth is safe in our home after the corn arrives.

We are also, as it happens, a corn chowder family. Devoted. Possibly aggressive. I’m pretty sure my mother, grandmother, and I each have our own version according to the inherited recipe books and cards I have pored over.

 I’m fairly certain we would absolutely fight for our version’s honor if it came to that. I also wouldn’t be surprised if my aunts and cousins have recipes of their own tucked away or passed down or invented anew. I've never asked. Maybe I should. It feels like something ancient. A quiet culinary competition played out in buttery bowls.

Corn, after all, is one of the oldest foods of this land. Indigenous farmers planted it alongside beans and squash, the Three Sisters, each crop helping the others grow. Our bowls of chowder might look different now, with their cream and potatoes and salt pork or bacon, but I like to think there’s a throughline in the way we honor it: slowly, deliberately, with care. And when corn season ends, as it always does too soon, there’s no real substitute. You can freeze it, shave it, try your best, but the magic never quite survives. It belongs to midsummer, and it knows it.

The Late-Onset Love Affair

I spent the first thirty years of my life actively avoiding tomatoes. From those wet, slippery slices on sandwiches to those sad, mealy wedges in salads. I wanted nothing to do with them or their jelly, seedy centers. But then I moved to Vermont, and something shifted. It started slow. A taste here, a slice there. And then, as if possessed by the ghost of the Italian nonna I must have had in a past life or maybe (more realistically)  just the pull of a good growing season, I fell headlong in love. Now, tomatoes are a cornerstone of my midsummer happiness and a sacred category somewhere between pet and produce.

I name my tomato plants. Last year I had Godzilla (a monster, obviously), Ketchup (his fruit goes soft too fast, poor thing), and Walter (no reason; just felt right). I don’t grow enough to can or make sauce, but what I do get is prized. Every tomato that ripens gets its moment: torn into panzanella, layered into caprese, or chopped into pico de gallo that I spoon straight onto chips or eggs or frankly, just into my mouth. These are my “girl dinner” staples: bread, basil, balsamic, a little salt, and a tomato that still has that grassy smell. It’s ridiculous how happy it makes me.

I don’t know much about how my mother or grandmother felt about tomatoes. I never paid attention. Why would I, when I thought they were gross? I heard stories about my grandfather turning five-gallon buckets into tomato plants that hung from the pergola, but I never asked Pop how much he actually loved the fruit or just the tinkering and the inventing. (Could have gone either way with him.) 

For  me, tomato love is a newer ritual, rooted not in memory but in place. In the good soil of this small Vermont backyard and the sleepy farm stands that appear like altars on the roadside. This is a personal devotion. A solo harvest. And every bite tastes like it was worth the wait.

When the Light Starts to Tilt

Soon the tomatoes will tip red, and the corn will start to toughen. Canning jars across the zip code will fill and vanish into cellars. Zucchini bread will go stale on counters, and the blueberry stains will fade from fingertips. But for now, there’s still time to eat with our hands, to pass butter from palm to palm, to slice warm fruit straight into the crust. Sure, the days are quick moving,  but they are also ancient in many ways. Repeating themselves in garden rows and roadside stands, in recipes passed through hands that remembered harder seasons. To eat midsummer in Vermont is to eat history. Our summers are sun-cured, sweat-streaked, and fleeting like a firefly. We savor it because it doesn’t last, sure. But we also savor it because it always comes back.