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Relishing A Green Tomato

Relishing A Green Tomato

Painting of a red tomato and a green tomato
The tomato’s electric potency grows from the carmine-and-ocher sunsets that calendared summer on upturned saffron buds. I spent August between them squashing snails in the humus as squirrels carried off the fruits of summer’s favor.  Saved from first frost and set on the windowsill, a green tomato’s skin silvers like the moon. The fruit is as crisply bitter as the early rime that blacked the vine, the acerbic smell promising flavors like grass clippings on a September day.  The moss shoulders round an inferior globe, firm in the palm, a tongue-buzzing inverse to e.e. Cummings’ perhaps, breaking the expected flavor of summer on its knee, preserving balance against the winter ahead.  What could it be, if not the tomato in full? Season it to taste, to mask the bitter seed, and bake it to the realization of its potential, to be frozen and kept on hand to warm short January days and hoary February nights.