Sitting on her throne.
I picked my first tomato of the season today. Truthfully, it was a bit of a cheat because I thought it was a long-awaited orange “Jubilee”, when in fact it turned out to be an “Early Girl” who hadn’t finished getting her makeup on. Never mind. The wonderful thing about tomatoes is that they can finish ripening indoors – a fact long exploited by the supermarkets, the restaurants and anyone else trying to sell you one in February.
This tomato is special. She is the first. She will be fawned over for the next couple of days while I wait for her to attain full perfection, and then she will be reverently sliced into a mozzarella basil sandwich…or diced into a small bowl of fresh salsa…or simply handed over to my daughter, who will bite into her like an apple, letting the juices run down her chin and onto my freshly mopped floor.
She has her own throne in my kitchen, this regal emissary. A little dish in the windowsill, where she will blush and bloom red and make me smile as I wash the evening dishes and think about what it took to get her here.
Seeds in February, sitting in a basket of “why haven’t you done this yet” on my counter. Seed flats in March, balanced precariously on top of the washing machine, shuddering with the spin cycle. Seedling overload in April, as plugs were replanted and more space was constantly borrowed. And finally, seedling liberation – flinging the whole thing out the door to brave the rough and ready of a cool May morning. I have coddled her and her siblings out there; mulched with straw when it was dry, picked foliage off when it was yellow, gave her compost and a dose of fish emulsion for good measure. And here she is. The First.
I have to take a moment or two to savor this feeling, because it will not last. Within a few short weeks if I am lucky, or in a day or two if I am not, hordes of her relatives will stand expectantly on my doorstep asking for a place in my kitchen. I will point to 82 jars of preserves, 36 jars of honey, an award from Susi Homemakers Anonymous, and ask for mercy. It will not be granted to me.
Soon there will be no respite from the onslaught.
They will come, just like their relatives before them, and fill baskets and bowls and pots and cracked casserole dishes, waiting…waiting for us to eat them, to process them, to sauce them and seed them and squish them – in short, to fulfill their destinies as tomatoes.
We will be brave, my family and I. We will fry tomatoes with eggs in the morning, add them to a salad at lunch, give them to the dog for dinner. We will eat more fresh tomatoes than is considered safe by modern medical standards, and experiment with tomato facial peels and foot rubs.
But at the end of the day, I will not get out of my duty to can them.
It’s not that canning a tomato is particularly difficult. In fact I consider it one of the easiest and most rewarding of all the vegetables to put in a jar. But we’ve just extracted honey, dear readers. We’ve just preserved innumerable cherries and black raspberries and strawberries – not to mention a batch or two of orange marmalade; and when I say “we” I mean “me and three spoon-lickers”. I was hoping for a little rest, a little respite from the stove and the steam and the endless jar-washing; but obviously the steam affected my reasoning, for of course the tomatoes will be early this year, just as everything else has been during this crazy Mid-Atlantic season of heat, drought and monstrous water bills.
But right now I am smiling. I am washing my dishes and looking at my little Early Girl and feeling happy that it is summer, that the sun is shining, the pellet stove is turned off, and that the season has given us our first little bundle of red joy.
It seems a shame to eat her.
