Tomato season.
Some suggest zucchini season is just as apt a name.
Either way, it involves people who don’t have but actually are overactive planters.
It’s a serious matter.
I’ve not seen studies confirming this, but I suspect that those who grow tomatoes, zucchini and other produce are higher risk of early memory loss.
Every year, they seem forget what happened the same time last year.
It’s beginning to tax our mental health delivery infrastructure by driving Zoom-based therapists crazy.
Therapist: So, your problem is that you have too many tomatoes?
Tomato Head: Yes.
Therapist: Did you have too many last year?
Tomato Head: Yes.
Therapist: If you plant as many this spring as you did last, do you think you’ll have to many next year?
Tomato Head: As my Grandma told me, only time will tell.
That typical conversation confirms the diagnosis of overactive planters because one of the key factors, as in other forms of substance abuse, is family history.
Etymologists tell us that’s the reason behind the naming of heirloom varieties passed on from generation to generation.
For those still wondering, there is a reason Zoom therapists are the only ones who treat people with over overactive planters.
Brick-and-mortar based therapists have long since tired of looking out into their reception rooms at day’s end to see little piles of cherry tomatoes beside every chair leg in the place. And it’s caused higher insurance premiums.
This kind of problem inevitably causes family dysfunction, something I was reminded of when my wife came back from her sister’s house a couple of weeks ago bearing fruit – large fruit and lots of it.
Tomato, of course, is a fruit, and my discovery this year that it is, in fact, an ovary wasn’t so much bothersome this year as helpful. Instead of having BLTs for dinner every noon and night, I could alternate BLTs with BLOs.
Still, the season was filled with anxiety and, I suspect, high blood pressure, both because of my wife’s family history and my own.
She grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s on a farm near Coldwater, Ohio, on which much of the food was home-grown and little went to waste. My mother grew up on a farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the 1930s, where waste was even more carefully battled.
Which means tomatoes may be the reason I married someone so much like my Mom. And the reason both come to the table at each meal with the same moral imperative on their minds: Every bit of food brought to the table must be eaten.
Each, then, begins every meal with pronouncement that she is not very hungry and repeatedly – nay, doggedly -- asks throughout the meal that someone else step forward to serve as the last line of defense against wasted food.
Since our children left home and my father’s passing, the only one usually at the table with either is me. And when I suggest to my wife a logical solution -- that we have more children to help address the problem, she emphatically declines.
Which means a lot of what otherwise would have been wasted food has ended up as “waisted food” located near my belt.
In moments of self-loathing, I’ve come to think I’ve become a living, breathing slop dish – the dish in to which my grandmother would leftovers would for consumption by farm animals.
Searching the internet for hope, I came across the opposite in this posting on the Touring Ohio – the Heart of America site, which calls Ohio the heart of it all when it comes to tomato abuse.
“Although the plant originated in Mexico, it would take a Reynoldsburg citizen to develop a way of growing these red fruits in a way that made sense commercially, to grow, harvest and pack tomatoes. …. In 1879 … Alexander Livingston began growing tomatoes commercially. He even developed a number of new tomato species.”
Then comes an ending as chilling as a cold glass of blood red juice.
“Livingston and his (wife) Matilda raised 10 children (apparently conceived to eat tomatoes ).
“He also taught Sunday school at the Ohio State Penitentiary,” home to the wayward men who had become the slop buckets of society.
Finally, this request: Next spring, remember to spay and neuter your tomatoes.
Tom Staff is a columnist for the Springfield News-Sun
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