The Love Apple

I hated tomatoes when I was a kid and didn’t really warm to that clear-acid-red taste until I was in my mid-twenties. Now I’ll do almost anything to get a wintertime fix. Ugli tomatoes taste the most like the real deal to me but they are elusive this time of year. The other day I found these “cocktail” size babies at Trader Joe’s. They are from Mexico which added a fresh jolt of guilt about shopping a reduced carbon footprint.

People work the land in my town and some live mainly by the food they grow. A couple of years ago at the Town’s September Ag Fair, a group of families put together a brochure calculated to influence the most hardened supermarket junkie. They listed the distance a fresh produce must travel to get to my town using the current commercial food chain. It was something like 1500 miles for a tomato. Maybe it’s jet lag that gives the classic packaged ones that pale, hardened carapace.

Time to plan the garden. I’m ignoring the snow flurries outside the window.

Sage has wintered over

I'm predictably amazed to find living things under the snow. This sage plant is about three years old and started life in a seed grower's mill (the plant version of a puppy mill is what I mean). No special lineage, just perseverance keeps it alive.

Good Day Sunshine

The sun is out this morning, hot and strong for a February day. Down the road the sap tappers are stringing plastic tubing tree to tree arranging the loops so that gravity does what strong backs did for years in these woods – bring in the clear maple juice.

Phil told me once that he always starts in the third week of February, which is where we are today, as his family has for many generations. Global warming doesn’t seem to have altered the local sugaring habits around here very much. Most people with a few trees still use buckets; the tappers with future sales in mind string the tubing and put in the all nighters tending the sap boil. Phil was ready for the long boils. His old sugar house had a cast off armchair, a bookcase of great literature and rug on the floor – all of it sticky from the sugar steam.

This is the time the year seems to turn toward summer. The land around our house lifts its face up to that big sun and warms. Snow melts down into the tree roots and liquefies the earth. And the Red Sox have reported to Fort Myers. The signs are all in place.