Apples of Love: Sweet One Hundred

Side note: Don't you love it when appointments fall through and suddenly you've got the rest of the whole, long, lovely afternoon? I do.

To the subject at hand. It is a truth of long standing that I do Not like tomatoes. No no no. And I am a lover of exotic foods, the toddler who happily munched on raw vidalia onions, the three year old that begged her mother to buy an artichoke, the four year old who calmly ordered a cheese omelette at her first Waffle House visit. The list of foods I will not eat is very short indeed.

But it does contain tomatoes (I think the only other things are sardines, salmon, and shrimp. Three nasty alliterative seafood). Pretty close to the top. I have never liked them: they look amazing, but then they are too acidic, too watery, too seedy, too . . . tomato-y. The only ones I make an exception for are yellow tomatoes, and they are divine. They are what red tomatoes want to be and never can attain. They are sweet, golden summer exploding in your mouth. But red tomatoes?

Anathema.

Ok, all that was just to establish that I am not a tomato fan, so that the following incident will have more significance. Yesterday, see, I came back from a hot, happy, sweaty walk, and ran some banana bread next door to our sweet elderly neighbors (Mom makes them banana bread about once a week. That woman . . . I've got a lot to live up to). I delivered the bread, explained to sweet Mrs. B. that if I hugged her she would have to shower too, and Mr. B. dropped a plastic bag in my hand - a ziploc full of tiny bright red tomatoes.
"Sweet One Hundred," he said. "They're the only tomatoes I eat, beside the ones on a hamburger."
Those words made me perk up. A fellow tomato hater proclaiming their praises? I popped one in my mouth.

Cold. Juicy. Flavorful but not tart. Lawsamercy, but they were good. I ate five more on the way home. And another five before supper.

I have found my tomato kindred spirit. Thank you, Mr. B.

***
And now for another long walk. And blueberry picking this evening! I really can't handle all the excitement in our little town. Next thing you know we'll be having a barn raising (actually that would be really, really fun. I digress).
These walks are becoming my sanity. Doing something physical is such a relief after five straight hours of reading/writing. Vacuuming is positively enjoyable, scrubbing sets me humming, and during the walks I think and wander and just decompress.

Then I go back and read the rest of the evening.

I've got so much to read this summer. Not just for the research, but my own personal list. I realized the other day a stack of 12 books had made its way into the den, and there are even more in the small study where I'm trying to keep them corralled. I'm trying to absorb all the Kathleen Norris possible, and then there's Common Grounds, The Genesis Question, Confessions from an Honest Wife, Inkheart, The Scent of Water, a wonderful Steve Brown, How People Change, Standing by Words - and that's just currently reading. I've got Graham Greene, Frederic Buechner, and Kierkegaard on the list. Will I get to them? Um, probably not. At least not before school starts. And then the things I read are always referencing other things to read and there are just so many books. And I want to devour them all.

"The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world."
-Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale