Tomatoes

As I sit, catching my breath after an overly-productive morning, I am enticed by the victims of my lunch: a bowl of dry-farmed, organic, tomatoes. Tomatoes this good are a bittersweet affair: each bite is perfect, but each bite brings us closer to the end, to the gustatory hibernation that we go through every year.

But it won't seem like darkness or gloom, because we will have fall mushrooms, persimmons, pomegranates (already have had those), chestnuts (been roasting at least five a day). The end of the tomatoes will hit sometime in late November, when the fall bounty is tapering off, and the reality of root veggie-dom starts to hit.

By March, we will tear our hair and gnash our teeth, which will be a good thing since it will be Lent, and that is a good time to really enjoy penance.

Today, you see, is another grey, gloomy day, unlike yesterday's glorious splendor of sparkling blue, and a lot like the weather on Friday (or was that Thursday), a grey, post-drizzling day when we went to the Monterrey Market.

The contrast between the overcast sky, the bundled customers and the piles of bright red, fragrant, round tomatoes could not have been more stark. With the mounds of orange, white and green pumpkins, the piles of green pears, the last anemic plums, autumn is definitely blowing its trumpet, but those tomatoes, those plump berries of joy, those tomatoes held up the standard, however Quixotic, of summer.

It gets dark earlier now, and the mornings are starting to sort of make me wish they'd pull the plug on Daylight Savings Time. Talk around here centers on duck confit, roasted pumpkin, hearty risotto, so, as I mentioned earlier, I can't really get too overwrought about the end of summer.

Anyway, if your area still has 'em, go out now and get the last of the organic, heirloom tomatoes and enjoy every bite, every drop of juice, every seed stuck in your molar.