Every summer, like clockwork, a particular kind of collective amnesia lifts. Tomatoes — real ones, the kind that bruise if you breathe on them too hard — return, and we remember they’re not just filler for BLTs or wedges to shove beside a burger. For a few fleeting weeks, we become evangelists. We declare that they “need nothing but salt.” We remind one another: the best ones never see the inside of a refrigerator. We post photos of them sliced and sweating in the heat, as if the act of witnessing alone might preserve them just a little longer.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the tomato mania — I certainly have, when I was younger and a little more cynical about everyday pleasures — but lately I’ve been thinking about what it reveals: a deep, hungry desire to feel the passage of time through something tangible. Something we can taste. In a world where the grocery store produce section hums along with seasonless consistency, tomato season offers the rare thrill of noticing. Noticing that the light has changed. That the fruit is warm from the sun.
