Tomatoes!!!

Tomatoes

Globes, teardrops, kidney shapes, pears..

scarred, pleated, cracked with brown,

gold and green and mottled red,

striped and parti-colored,

that peculiar green tomato smell

(the smell of a summer garden)

rough, fuzzy stems,

yellow flowers;

sun and earth and seed and memory:

heirlooms.

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Brandywine, Marvel Stripe, Black Prince, Cherokee Purple, Flamme Orange, Green Zebra, Lemon Boy, Vintage Wine, White Beauty, Sun Gold, Beefsteak, Indigo Rose...If you thought that lovely romantic names were the exclusive province of roses and beautiful flowers, think again. Then add to scent and color the sense description of taste. It is tomato season.

A walk through your farmers’ market doesn’t do the tomato family justice. Beguiled by the smell of tomatoes, I’ve picked up the occasional beefsteak or even a nameless red tomato, and sliced it or fried it or layered it or basil-and-mozzarella-ed it without grasping the spectrum of flavor available. No more.

This week, we experienced a tomato tasting and lunch at our friends’ house in Palo Alto.  I have been an on-again, off-again gardener all my life, planting the occasional pepper plant or cherry tomato seedling. I do better with herbs. In small pots. But Ann and Allen’s garden shows what avid gardeners can do: assorted beans, berries, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers growing vertically, horizontally, and every way from upside down to sideways--in beds, in boxes, in pots, in the ground. Marvelous.

Even more marvelous was our sumptuous lunch: salad greens with a king’s bounty of various items from the garden; there was also hearty bread and smoked duck and olives and mozzarella--and raspberries for dessert.

City-dwellers that we are, we forget the taste of authenticity. Granted, the relatively recent farm-to-table movement seems to be working at whittling the distance between growers and consumers, but seeing farm-to-table reduced to backyard-to-table was inspiring, to say the least. Popping sugar-sweet cherry tomatoes (ahem--or Sungolds!) has to be a lot healthier than popping potato chips. Thanks, Ann. Maybe next year, I’ll work on a pot or two of edible beauty instead of those mundane flowers.

Summer Doldrums

How else can I explain the lack of output? I haven't written anything since my last poetry workshop at Chautauqua, in spite of resolutions to the contrary. I seem to have been adrift on a sea of ennui. But that luxury is about to end.

There is one week until we depart for San Diego. One week to prepare ourselves and the house for the onslaught of the granddaughters, who will be arriving before we return. There are rooms to clear, beds to make up, toys and books to rescue from closets, and plans to be made for their visit. And, since this visit is the last one before they depart with their parents for Dundee, Scotland for two years, there are a lot of other preparations to be made: storage space to secure, preparations for the transport and storage of their car, carseats to maneuver into back seats, and realignment of our Netflix queue to include the latest and greatest in kid TV.

And so, my current wish list includes a few days with tolerable levels of heat and humidity so that I can reclaim the sidewalk from the weeds that have staged a coup there. I'd like to cut back the plants on the patio so they can revive themselves in my absence with some new growth. I'd like a good rainy day or two to wash off the dust and give everything a good long drink of water. And I'd like the painter who painted my gate to come back and deal with the mess he made: the gate has blisters the size of my thumb that swell and deflate at random in various places. It looks diseased. Last time I let any painter other than Billy near my house!

But, so it goes. Before we know it, it will be fall. I don't know whether to be glad or not.