Yes I Can Can (But I Choose Not To. Today, Anyway)

Well, here is Sunday, late afternoon and we've had a rain shower and Mr. Moon and the youngest child are off to the movies and I'm still a bit under the weather, although as you can see from the picture above I have been eating my fair share of tomatoes.
That was an eggplant and squash casserole with tomatoes on top. I made it last night because the garden will not stop making eggplant and squash. Or tomatoes, actually.
That's the thing about a garden. It's all or nothing.
All winter long you yearn for a real tomato, one just picked and still warm from the sun which has nurtured it into red tomato goodness and then finally it's spring and you plant your tomatoes and you water them and you give them yummy meals of chicken shit to encourage their growth and then at long last, the baby green tomatoes appear and your heart bursts with joy and you protect your baby tomatoes as they grow and finally! one is ready to pick and you pick it, you do! and it's so good and it's a celebration and a joy, that first tomato, dripping with its sweet, salty juices and life is so good.
And then, there are more tomatoes and you are even more joyful! Tomatoes! You will feast on tomatoes! You will eat them on sandwiches and in salads and you will eat them standing over the sink or in fresh tomato pasta or cut up on casseroles and no matter what you do, you cannot keep up with the tomatoes and before you know it, you are drowning in tomatoes and there is nowhere in the kitchen to put down a cutting board because every surface is drowning in ripe, red goodness.
And still, the garden calls- more tomatoes! ready for the picking! Bring your basket, your biggest basket! We are ready and ripe for you!
And you just think, Oh dear. Oh my. What have I done?
And the same is true for the squash and the eggplant and it was true for the snow peas, although they're done now.
But to be frank, the cucumbers and the green beans are doing nothing, nothing I tell you, just vining up and being green and not making vegetables to speak of, which is a disappointment.
There have been years when I got out the canning jars and the canning kettle and the jar lifter and the salt and the vinegar and the spices and I have made pickles, oh my lord, have I made pickles. The dill, the sweet, the ones so sweet it takes three weeks and an antique ceramic vessel to make them because it takes all of three weeks and antique vessel magic to exchange every cucumber molecule for sugar molecules and I am not kidding you.
There is no candy on earth with as much sugar in it as those pickles so of course they are the family favorite.
They would be yours, too, if you tried them.
And I have canned tomatoes in past years and I have made my own ketchup and I have made my own salsa, as well and there is nothing on earth so satisfying as lifting the steaming jars from the kettle and setting them down on the counter and hearing that lovely "pop" as the lids suck in and you know you've done it right and then seeing all those jewel-like jars of tomatoes or pickles there- evidence of your tender garden nurturings, your kitchen labor love.
I may have been a Mormon in a former lifetime.
But today, probably because I am sick, and possibly because I am old, just the thought of sterilizing all those jars and lids and boiling the tomatoes and removing their skins, and the heat and the work- well, it just sort of makes me want to go crawl up in the bed and fall asleep with the fan blowing on my head.
Which is what I think I will do right now until my former-lifetime Mormonism passes and leaves me as I am today, a slightly ill, hotflashing woman of no particular belief at all, unless it is a belief in the goodness of gardening, the righteousness of the Mason Jar, the gratefulness for the overabundance of the tomatoes.