~you can't help but to love them~

The tomato plants in our garden are loaded with green tomatoes that are waiting for the sun to ripen them just one or two days more.  Already we have picked so many of them and I've enjoyed the sweet and delicious taste of more than just a few.  My favorite snack in the summer time has grown to be sliced tomatoes sprinkled with coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper. I could eat them like candy and sometimes I do.

I don't know what it is about a tomato from the garden but they sure do taste good.  I get a craving for them about this time of year.  I've never found any in the store that are as tasty as one grown in my own backyard.  I'm good with the Vitamin C.

My mom loved tomatoes too and deep in my 60-year old memory bank there are stored many remembrances of the things she told me about the humble yet proud tomato.  When she and my dad got married back in 1940, they were young and poor but very much in love.  They were determined to make it, regardless of what they had to do along the way.  One of the things my mother learned as a child was to grow a garden.  She was actually very good at it, even at a very young age.  Growing things and then canning and preserving them as the season progressed allowed her to be able to cut their grocery bill in half during those early days. Tomatoes were something that she grew lots of and when I say lots, I really mean that.

She told me once that during their very first year together that she grew enough tomatoes to put up nearly 50 quarts of them for the coming winter.  When times were lean, which probably was every other Friday, she and my dad ate tomatoes and bread with butter for their supper.  That was it. They didn't starve to death and I'm going to guess that they didn't have many colds that first year of married life either.  I asked her once if they ever got tired of eating them and I'll always remember her response.

"Peggy Ann, you sometimes have to do what you must do in order to survive.  We knew that's all there was, so we just made the best of it."

As the years progressed and they became parents to 7 children spread out from 1941-1957, Mom continued to grow her own vegetables and every year there were quarts of tomatoes gleaned from the garden and put up on the shelf in the pantry to feed the hungry bellies of our family.  We had them many times and surprisingly enough, I think all of us still like them today.  I suppose it is all in how you look at it. The lowly tomato is food and when food is not aplenty, you learn to eat whatever there is and love it.  It's called sustenance.

I learned plenty of thrifty things by watching my mom over the years and growing a garden was a very important one.  I saw what she did without, things that she tried to hide from us, but I knew them anyways.  There isn't a time that I go out and pick a tomato that I don't think of her and hope that she knew how much I appreciated what she sacrificed for me.  I regret that I often said I didn't like her breaded tomatoes but I think she probably understood.  They are an acquired taste and I believe that she never lost the love for that particular manner of fixing them.  As for me on the other hand, I never felt the love for a dish of soggy bread with tomatoes floating in it.  My mom would laugh to hear me say that today.  She would say that I didn't know what was good for me.   Mom was a child of the Great Depression and she learned early on in life how to make do when it was all you could do.

Raw, fried green, cooked, and a thousand other ways (except breaded of course).........
Tomatoes.
You can't help but to love them.

She's been gone for 9 years now and so much has happened in the meantime.  Mom was 87 years old when she passed away.  I wouldn't want her to have to live as she did at the end of her life.  Her aches, pains, and anxiety are all gone now but I still miss not having a mom around to talk to, ask questions of, and to love.