Tomato harvest time

For the past two weeks my tomatoes have been ripening. I've been enjoying tomato sandwiches, BLTs, sliced tomatoes, and tomatoes in salads. Shortly we'll have fried green tomatoes for the first time in a while. Every time I eat one, I remember that they would have cost a dollar apiece at the local farm stand.

Today I picked nine tomatoes. Tomorrow I will probably pick another half dozen. This means one thing: it's time to start making sauce.

I've made sauce several times before. Two years ago I made several batches, at least one of which was ready for my sister's birthday, which means they ripened at least a week earlier. I know I've made sauce in previous years, but the only time I remember clearly was after my father died in 2005.

My father's death was both sudden and long in coming. It was the result of a traumatic brain injury after an accidental fall at a nursing home when he was left unattended in a wheelchair outside of his room after a shower. (There was a single nurse who was attending to all of the residents in that wing at shower time; all the others were apparently on break together, smoking outside.) He lingered for a few days, moving between being semi-comatose and babbling incoherently. He held on long enough for my mom and my sister to make it back from Space Congress in Florida, where they had gone just a few days before.

The death of someone who had to that point required so much attention leaves an enormous hole in your schedule. Suddenly you find yourself with lots of free time and no real plans, even after all the details of the funeral have been dealt with. In the days after my father's death, I turned to my long-neglected garden and realized that I had a ton of tomatoes that needed to be picked. So I picked them and started to make sauce.

I haven't kept records of when I've made sauce before. But I realize that I did have a record of the date of my father's death in 2005 in the blog entry I posted. I looked it up, and there was the date: August 24, 2005. He will have been dead thirteen years this Friday.