First (and Last) Fruits

LAST FRUIT (Sep 29, 2009)

The last crop of 2009

My ears ache and my nose is running.  Last week I was wearing shorts, and all the windows in the house were wide open.  Today I wore two sweaters and jeans on my morning walk and matched the brisk weather with a crisp pace.  Fall is officially here.

Yesterday I picked what I think will be the last of the tomato crop.  Once the days are cooler and less sunny, the green ones stop ripening.  My mother-in-law picks all the green tomatoes before the last frost and somehow manages to get them to turn red in the house.  I’ve tried her method.  “Wrap them in newspaper and leave them in the cellar, then when they begin to turn yellow, put them on the kitchen window sill, and be sure to turn them daily.”  All I ever got was newspapers soaked with the juice of a couple dozen rotting green tomatoes in the basement.  I left all the green ones on the vines.

The last tomato harvest turns summer to fall for me and sets the “before winter” to-do list into motion.  Gardens must be cleaned out, overgrown perennials split up and moved, and Christmas planning begun.  The cooler temperatures are energizing, but the last tomato crop is always a wistfully sad day for me.

There will be eight months before seedlings begin to appear in the garden from last year’s drops.  Then another two filled with cultivating, thinning, tying vines to the fence, and daily watching for the first ripe fruit.

FIRST FRUIT  (Jul 26, 2009)

Note quite ripe

I’ve been watching everyday for a couple of weeks now, ever since I got a photo from a friend from a warmer growing zone of her first garden harvest.  Just yesterday I looked—no ripe tomatoes yet.  Sigh.  Summer isn’t fully here until the tomatoes are ripe.

And today, I knew there be any ripe overnight, but I looked anyway from across the yard while “taking in the warshing”, as my gramma used to say.  And I saw red!  Leaving the towels draped over the edge of the basket, I had to get closer.  YES!  I had an entire cluster of cherry tomatoes turned bright red and untouched by bugs or birds (quite rare in my garden!)  I picked the two reddest, pulled off the stems, and rubbed the droplets of whatever that stuff is that makes a tomato plant smell weird and gets your hands sticky green. I paused, just briefly in full salivation mode, to wonder why the first tomato of the season taste so good, and then I more than tasted it—I put the entire fruit in my mouth and bit down.

Slightly sweet, and wonderfully tart juice burst into and out of my mouth trickling down my chin, since I couldn’t but help grin, thus breaking the first rule of cherry tomato eating: never, under any circumstances, open your mouth when biting down.  Again, I thought about why these two particular tomatoes are so special.  They really didn’t taste as good as the ones I will let stay on the vine just a little longer, testing my luck with the bugs and birds, until the sun transforms them into the sweet acidic gems in my salads.

But they are the First.  I have waited since last fall for this taste, through the barrenness of winter (surviving on grocery store imitations), the toil of spring, and the anticipation of summer.  The deliciousness, I think, is intensified by the long wait.

Some years I have given a Biblical First Fruits Offering, by taking the first luminous tomatoes to a neighbor.  The sacrifice of waiting just a couple more days for more green tomatoes to soak up the sun’s ripening power is intensely real and acute.  The recipient doesn’t even know the gift they are eating, but that’s part of the sacrifice.

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Waiting is hard in America because we have the economic infrastructure to gratify our desires.  We truck in produce from warmer climes; we have express checkout lanes in grocery stores; Fed-Ex profits from our need-to-have-it-now culture; and if circumstances don’t happen quickly enough, we feel we have a right to complain.  If we don’t have the money for what we want, we buy on credit instead of building a fund from week to week until we put the last dollar in the jar.

Watching my tomatoes this summer has taught me a valuable lesson– I guess I knew it, but never thought about it consciously.  By giving in to my desires and pushing aside the waiting, I rob myself of the sweetness that can only come after the waiting.

There is a bowl of tomatoes on my kitchen counter, but I’m already longing for the taste of the sun-warmed first-fruits next July.

What do you think?  Do you enjoy waiting?  Have you experienced the greater joy of delayed gratification?  I’d really like to know.

FINAL NOTE

You’ve been waiting for over a month (eagerly, I hope!) for this Ordinary Girl to post.  I promise to strive to post weekly, like I said I was going to (barring any computer crashes).  But… if you have to wait a little longer, maybe your enjoyment will be increased with the anticipation.