Hello and Goodbye

We were very happy when tomato season began. For four months baskets of tomatoes cluttered the snake room and the kitchen, waiting to fully ripen, waiting for me to do something with them. Finally, last week I put the last containers of Roma tomatoes in the basement upright freezer. There was little room for them – the entire top shelf was already full of cartons of tomatoes, with overflow on a lower shelf.

There. That’s done. Only one tomato remained, an Old German that was picked just before the hard freeze. It was very immature and has been slowly ripening. Yesterday I noticed that, although it wasn’t fully ripened, it was beginning to shrivel a bit.

The bottom looked a little better. Old Germans are basically yellow with red striations.

“It’s now or never,” I thought, and sliced it for bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, the last for this year.

The great thing about gardening is that you plant seeds, watch them grow into vegetables, eat or freeze or can them, and then it’s over just about the time you are sick and tired of dealing of the produce you greeted so enthusiastically months ago. Garden produce receives a hearty hello and a relieved goodbye.

If only all the objects that have come into my life conformed to that cycle, but alas, they do not. Most objects have no season. They linger on long after my interest in them has waned. They are the flotsam and jetsam of life.

Books are my principal burden. Dennis and I both have a weakness for books. We acquire many of them and our house has bookshelves in every room except the bathrooms. Even our dining table is surrounded by books.

If we live to be one hundred we could never read or re-read all of them. Knowing that my days are numbered, I feel the burden of these books. When we are gone what will the children do with all of them? I feel guilty about keeping them, but there are so many I don’t know where to begin.

Ironically, I bought a book to instruct me.

Isn’t that a hoot?

With the help of Ms. Jay, I look forward to bidding some books a relieved goodbye.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer