Let’s call the whole thing off
I'm so over tomatoes. Ask anyone who has ever worked on a farm over the summer and they'll tell you. It starts out great, but once you're drowning in them and have been for weeks, enough is enough.
Work is consumed with harvesting row after row of them, picking them at different levels of ripeness to get them before the raccoons do. Harvesting cherry tomatoes takes hours and leaves my fingers stained green and my arms itchy. We have to wipe down each and every one, checking them all over for damage, sort them into crates by levels of ripeness, dump bucket after bucket of putrid smelling rotten ones in the woods, sell the good ones at market, and take the rest home to turn into sauce and salsa and soup for the winter.
Tomatoes have stolen all my free time and today I realized it's time for us to break up.
Some of our tomatoes from my market two weeks ago- also featuring the cutest dog I’ve ever seen.
Crates of leftovers. This was stacked at least four high.
This morning, like every Monday, I went for a walk with my friend Elaina. When I got home it was past noon and my plan was to get in the studio and get a jump on some of the pieces I was planning to make tomorrow. But when I walked through the door I noticed the two crates of tomatoes sitting on my counter that I had yet to process and I decided that before getting to work, I would go ahead and get a couple of batches of sauce going: one to can later in the evening, and one to use for our dinner. It took over an hour before I was done chopping up all the tomatoes, getting them in the sauce pan and placing them on a sheet to roast.
By the time I finally got all the tomatoes roasting and saucing away, I began to feel really hungry so I made lunch. When I was done eating I looked over and saw that my timer for the roasted tomatoes was due to go off in less than 15 minutes. So I waited until they were done because I didn't want to sit at my bench only to have to get up again immediately. I pulled the tomatoes out, sat on the couch for a minute- and woke up two hours later.
Two batches of sauce from today.
I didn't mean to fall asleep- especially when I had plans to get in the studio, but by the time I was done with the damn tomatoes I just needed a minute to rest, and then my body took over and shut my brain down. Lately I've been talking a lot about needing more time for my work and my hobbies, and wanting to balance everything better so it can somehow match the fantasy I have on loop in my head. But the reality is that I'm prioritizing an obligation I've created for myself over the things I actually want to be doing, like making jewelry.
Why do we torture ourselves with the fantasy? Why is it that when we have a hobby (like canning) we feel we have to be the best at it and give it all we've got or we're somehow failing at fun? At the start of summer, Wes and I bought a bunch of jars and got everything we needed to start canning all the tomatoes and other vegetables we could in preparation for winter. I have brought home at least a crate of tomatoes a week since they ripened. We've canned sauces and salsa. We've frozen batch after batch of slow roasted sauce.
This year’s cans of sauce and salsa.
Why isn't this enough? Why do I keep bringing home the tomatoes when it's become an obligation to keep going and they've more than lost their appeal? I tell myself I'm doing it for future us in the winter, when we'll want tomato sauce for recipes. But there's literally two jars of sauce leftover from last year that we haven't opened and we made far less of it then.
The obvious answer to this problem is to simply stop bringing home tomatoes, which I've already decided I won't be doing next week after market. But going forward, I feel like this actually taught me something about obligation and why we shouldn't be exhausting ourselves doing things we don't really want to do. For all the complaining I've done about not having more studio time, I never considered that it was the excess of tomatoes I was processing every weekend that was the problem. I assumed it was the strenuousness of my job, the heat of summer, and getting older that was making me feel so tired and lackluster about everything. Instead it was me trying (and failing) to live up to a fantasy of my own making.
So it's time to end my relationship with tomatoes for the time being. I may choose to bring home one last crate or two before the season ends, but for now, I'm going to be grateful for what I already have put away on my shelf and in my freezer and leave it at that.
