Country Mouse Monday: what tomatoes teach...

July is that peak month of the year, the culmination of so much planning and planting, so full, so tasty, and also, let's face it, so relentless. 

I had a moment the other day, coming in the garden gate, when I realized we'd hit that Feed Me, Seymour point, when the plants are just huge and getting huger, taking over. It's hard to tell where one garden box ends and another begins -- it's all just a giant tangle of green. It starts to feel a bit, well, too big.

And yet, this abundance: that's the whole point, right?

All of that planting back in March and April and May was to create this very abundance.  

I did this on purpose.

So I wonder at my own reaction, watching my desire to retreat just as I am beginning to get what I wanted in the first place.

Oh tomatoes, must you teach me this lesson every year?

This abundance? I made it. So I'm making the most of it, capturing every bit of flavor and vigor I can.

Too soon it will be gone. Already, this morning at 5:30 it was definitely darker than it was a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes I catch whiffs of fall in the air, and last night, leaving a show in San Francisco, I was cold for the first time in ages.

Ok, Yes: I say Yes to all this food we made happen. I pile tomatoes high, gloriously high, carrying them in whatever I can -- the front of my shirt, baskets, bowls.

The plants are so dense with foliage that finding the ripe fruit can a meditative pursuit: I sit back on my heels and let my eyes go soft, scanning through a choke of stems and leaves for a flash of red.

July means bags of tomatoes to the neighbors, and it means sauce and dried tomatoes and caprese salads and standing in the garden with juice running down my arm, eating tomatoes like apples, wishing I'd thought to bring out some salt.

And not running from, but appreciating, the abundance of the world around me, holding in my hands and savoring the fruit of my own labors, sharing it, saving it, loving it.

XX