You say tomato

Today I've been thinking about tomatoes. It started, I think, in the Concepts of Nature class when we discussed Meridel LeSueur's short story "Harvest," with its marvelously evocative description of the woman getting her hands dirty in the garden. "That's not the part of gardening I like," I said. "The part I like is when you take the fresh tomatoes inside and eat them."

Then later at the grocery store I looked with disgust at the pathetic packages of tiny, hard, flavorless tomatoes. March is a bad time to be a tomato lover. It's starting to look like spring outside, but the ground is still too cool to nurture tomato plants. It'll be months before we see any fresh tomatoes from the garden, and last season's tomatoes are just a dim memory. It seems impossible but it's true that not so long ago the kitchen counter was covered with tomatoes: big red juicy slicing tomatoes and tiny yellow salad tomatoes that burst in your mouth and Roma tomatoes for sauce and purply-black tomatoes full of luscious juices and low-acid yellow tomatoes glowing like sunshine.

They're all gone now except the ones that went into sauce. Recently I discovered how to turn homemade tomato sauce into a pretty fair approximation of Campbell's canned tomato soup. There are only three essential ingredients (tomato sauce, salt, sugar), although I'll add pepper, onion, cream, and worcester sauce to liven it up. It's not at all the same as fresh tomatoes sliced and eaten as a side dish at every meal, but the sauce preserves a bit of summer sunshine, which is just what the doctor ordered to combat the too-long-til-tomato-time blues.