My favorite meal ever, and I can’t remember what I ate

There’s something elemental about Midwestern summer evenings — humid air, cicadas churring, lightening bugs, bats swooping. For me, they evoke fond memories. It’s maybe why one of my best meals ever was in Uruguay.

We were just north of Carmelo, upriver from the beaches and scene in Montevideo. Quiet. rolling pastures. Unhurried. In the countryside. On a summer night.

We’d arrived at the restaurant by two-lane blacktop, past miles of sandy-brown hay and alfalfa, grazing cows, and stands of eucalyptus trees. Save for the eucalyptus trees, it was a page out of my teen years driving to Grafton to watch slow-pitch softball games on summer evenings after my lifeguarding duties were done for the day. Barefoot in a blue Chevy Caprice, windows down, Super Tramp on the cassette. This time, I had shoes on.

We pulled into the farmhouse — Narbona, they’d named it. We could have been arriving for Sunday dinner at my uncle’s home in Iowa. A simple home with a porch rimmed by a stone wall and a floor in diamond patterned tile like a jester’s suit. Side buildings in various stages of tilt. Two 1950s pickup trucks, one red, the other mint green. Fruit trees out back.

Narbona back in 2005, the year we visited, was not yet labeled a “wine lodge” as it is today. Its owner was still toiling away at the renovations of this farmhouse and winery first built nearly one hundred years ago in 1909. Granted, he was designing it to look old-timey and authentic, but unlike the sports bars with old hockey sticks on the wall, this worked. And so did the farm, literally.

The cows we’d passed were responsible for the wheels of cheese for sale. The fruit trees were responsible for the jars of jams on the shelves. Bread was kneaded and baked in a panderia that looked like it once was a chicken coop. And the vineyards were responsible for the glass of wine we were sipping.

It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the sleeping dog who was flinching and yipping as he dreamed on the porch.

We sat at a small table on the front porch listening to the crickets work up a good lather. Distance was the only difference from the farmhouses of my childhood.

I’ve long since moved to a city, but on that porch, on that summer night, I was back playing in the barn with my cousin, Jeanne, crawling through tunnels of baled straw in the loft or letting the new calves latch onto my fingers and suck, seeking their own mother, or hoisting myself up into the squeaky leather saddle for a pony ride.

We ordered, I’ve forgotten what. We talked as the moon rose. The waitress brought our meal as the evening cooled and the stars came out. I cannot remember what I ate. Yet it is a meal that I still remember these thirteen years later.

I wonder, are the most memorable meals because of the food or the place?