The tomato parade has begun and soon tomatoes in various stages of red will be covering every surface of our kitchen.Tomatoes are the heart of summer, the fruit of hot and humid days that get even hotter when you spend them standing over steamy pots of tomato sauce. Mother nature is a funny gal with a cruel sense of irony, ripe tomatoes can’t wait till cooler days for canning. So I’ll be spending many sweaty August weekends stirring fat batches of sauce. And I won’t complain about the heat because I don’t take homegrown tomatoes for granted. Just keep the tub of joy full so I can cool off between stirrings.

Even non-tomato people can’t help but appreciate tomato lovers’ enthusiasm for summer’s most revered vegetable. Oh the joy. The rapture. Even the hubby gets really happy when the tomatoes start rolling in. Bust out the bacon!  People go looloo over tomato season.

My fondest summer memories include my mom and my gram getting all worked up over tomato season. Gram would bring in tomatoes from the plants growing outside her kitchen window and both her and my mom would start drooling like Pavlov’s dogs. They’d slice ‘um thick, eat them with a fork and proclaim each bit delicious. My mom can put away tomatoes like I’ve never seen. Though I wasn’t a tomato fan as a kid, I sensed I was missing out on something special — a summer ritual.

Now we grow our own tomatoes and I’m a greedy tomato lover. I’ll march in the tomato parade until the bounty winds down. As summer starts to languish, so does the tomato harvest. By then I’m sick of the color red. But right now, I’m celebrating summer with fresh salsa, brushetta, thick sauce and mini tomato pizzas made with a friend’s handmade tortillas.

The bossman is threatening to sell some of our tomatoes at the farmers’ market. We could spread the love with our early tomatoes and I’m sure we’d make some extra cash. But I think that would be unwise, like counting our tomatoes before they ripen. This is just the start of tomato season, we have no idea whether or not we’ll have enough tomato sauce to get us through the winter. I haven’t canned one jar of sauce yet, and I’ve grown accustomed to the taste of homemade tomato sauce. It is especially good in the winter, when I haven’t smelled a real tomato in six months. Besides, my mom is coming to visit soon and we’ll need lots and lots of tomatoes to keep her in the red.

If the lyrics of Guy Clark’s song are true, “There’s just two things that money can’t buy and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes,” then we are living a priceless life here in the Eden of Garden.