The First Cookout of the Year

The cover comes off the grill on a Saturday in May, and the winter comes out with it. A blackened leaf stuck to the grate. A cobweb stretched from handle to lid, home of a spider that will have to relocate. Rust freckling the burners where the rain found its way in. The grease trap holds a wedge of congealed fat from an October that now feels like something that happened to someone else.

This is the honest beginning of the season. The weather in May is unpredictable. The morning is warm, the afternoon warmer, the evening a sharp and sudden betrayal. No matter. The grill is uncovered, and the grill is the one member of the household that never argues about the forecast.

The Uncovering

Every backyard has its own liturgy, and the liturgy begins with judgment. The propane tank is hefted and given a shake, its remaining weight a matter of household debate. The charcoal household fills the chimney starter, wads paper underneath, and strikes the match that produces, for a beautiful second, a flame that looks like it might take over the whole setup. It flares, it curls, it settles. There is a particular smell to that first ignition of the season: metal burning off the memory of the season before.

Nobody plans the first cookout. It is not a date on the calendar; it is a decision reached at the grocery store or in the driveway, on a morning when the sky is clear enough and the wind low enough to make the whole enterprise feel safe. The forecast may call for a day that is almost warm, with evening coming down hard. That is accepted. Jackets are allowed at the table. This is part of the ritual.

In the deep South the grill never really stops, and the first cookout of the year is less a milestone than a continuation. In the northern half of the country, where the grill spent the winter under its cover on the porch or in the garage, the first cookout of May is an act of faith. The long weekend that closes the month is the traditional deadline, the day everyone agrees the season has started whether it has or not. But the true first cookout rarely waits for that. It comes on an ordinary Saturday, when the temperature crosses the threshold that makes the risk feel worth taking.

The smoke of these first cookouts behaves oddly. May air is heavy, full of the damp it collected in April, and the smoke from the evening's first fire hangs low around the roofline instead of rising the way July smoke rises. The whole block sees it before they smell it, a gray banner stating plainly that someone has gone first. This is the news of the year, and it travels.

The first burgers of the year are rarely the best burgers of the year. The cook has spent six months out of practice. The fire runs too hot, or it runs too cold, or it runs both ways at once. The first round comes off the grate with a perfect black crosshatch and a center still cool. Everyone eats them anyway, because the alternative would be to admit that the season is not yet ready for them, and no one is willing to make that admission.

The First Menu

The first cookout of the year is modest. It is the household, the neighbor who was in the yard anyway, the people who answered the text before it was fully sent. Paper plates. The dollar salad from a bag. The ketchup bottle that spent the winter in the refrigerator door, last squandered in November. The buns are soft and faintly sweet, the grocery-store kind, purchased that morning in an all-purpose run that also produced a tank of propane and a bag of charcoal for the next cookout, whenever that turns out to be.

The menu has a set backbone. Burgers. Hot dogs, because someone always wants them, even here, even now. A single pack of bratwurst for the optimist. The potato salad is a choice of loyalties: the ones who buy it from the deli counter, the ones who make it the night before, the ones who have been waiting all winter to break out the good mayonnaise and will not be rushed. The coleslaw is often an afterthought. The strawberries are early and not perfect, and they are eaten anyway, standing up at the counter before the meal has properly begun.

There is a particular silence that belongs to the person standing at the grill. The tongs are the scepter. The grill is the only appliance that draws a small crowd of onlookers, people who come out not to help but to watch, drawn by the first real heat of the season. Everyone else shuffles around inside, making the salad, setting out the plates, opening the first can of the year's porch beer. This is as close to a liturgy as the season comes.

The evening will betray the afternoon. The sun drops behind the neighbor's roof and the temperature drops with it, the way it only does in May, when the ground has not yet agreed to hold the heat. The table is on the deck, or in the driveway, or on the tailgate of a truck. People eat in the company of their own warm breath. Hooded sweatshirts appear from nowhere. A fleece blanket gets claimed by the person nearest the wind. The potato salad is genuinely cold, the burger genuinely hot, and the contrast is the whole point of the exercise.

No one lingers at the table the way they will by July. But the meal does not end at the table. Plates come inside. The grill is left to cool, ticking and settling like a stove. The company drifts to the fence, to the driveway's edge, to wherever the light lasts longest. Someone says that it is going to be a good year. It is a sentence that would embarrass everyone involved if repeated in August, and in the first cool dark of the first cookout, it is the truest thing anyone has said in months.

The Smoke Signal

The first cookout of the year is a private event with public consequences. The smoke is the announcement, and the announcement is contagious. By the next Saturday, there are grills going four houses down. The week after that, the whole block has joined the season. The man at the end of the street, the last holdout, is spotted at the hardware store buying a new grate. The season has reached its tipping point, and it was reached in a single May evening of the lowest possible drama.

The other signs come with the smoke. The porch furniture is hauled out of the basement, the winter's accumulation brushed off the cushions. The birdfeeder is refilled for the first time since the snow flew. The lawn is cut enough to matter, the mower's first pass of the year leaving a stripe that is the color of the season itself. Children reappear on bikes, out past the time the streetlights would have brought them in last month, because the season is young and so are they, and the rules are not what they will be in August.

There will be other cookouts. Better cookouts, longer cookouts, cookouts in July that end with fireflies and citronella and the sound of neighbors talking over the fence in the thick dark. There will be cookouts in September that try to hold on, that argue against the closing of the year, that serve the last peppers and say nothing about the dark coming earlier. All of those cookouts will be good. But the first one is the one that matters, because it is the only one that had to prove something. It had to prove that the winter was over, that the faith was justified, that the season would actually come back this time.

It always does. And the proof is there in the smoke of a Saturday in May, low and gray, hanging over the rooftops, telling the whole neighborhood that the long campaign of cold is done, and the heat has arrived in the only form that counts: a flame, a grate, a table full of people recently persuaded that summer is not a rumor.