by Joanne Wiklund
A wonderful thing is a tomato, a tomato’s a wonderful thing… No wait a minute. That’s Tigger’s song. An ode to a tomato would have a different tune, but so many words have already been used to describe tomatoes.
A fruit? Call it what you will, but try to imagine a BLT without the T, spaghetti without the sauce, pizza with no tomato on the crust. Digging through my sizable piles of papers in my office, I unearthed Mom’s recipe for chili sauce, which we used instead of ketchup while we were growing up. She raised her own tomatoes and peppers red and green, as well as onions to make it. We helped weed that garden but occasionally the weeds would get away from us and we wound up picking ripe tomatoes out of dry grass. They were so good. We’d just run them under the water from the pump, take a bite, shake on the salt and eat them whole under a tree in the side yard.
This year however, tomatoes are taking their time to ripen. A little slower than some years. One well-aged gardener takes to his golf cart this time of year and shares his produce with his neighbors who no longer garden. Tomatoes are big hit and this week he shared two large ripe tomatoes with a neighbor. She mentioned how glad she was that he knew how to get the tomatoes to ripen because they were so beautiful. “You must have a secret to get them to ripen,” she told him.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “After the sun’s down and it gets really dark about midnight, I sneak out to the garden and sing Elvis Presley songs to my tomatoes. Never fails to help them ripen early.” If you leave a window open in your bedroom and wake up at midnight, be sure to listen for “A Big Hunk Of Love” being sung in your neighbor’s garden. That’s got to be the ode to tomatoes.
Psalm 103:5 “Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
Psalm 23:5 “Thou prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”
1 Corinthians 10:31 “Whether thou therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.”