Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Those who live long enough will eventually become their parents and/or grandparents.

That’s just a fact of life.

As I stood over the kitchen sink with the juice of an over-ripe tomato dripping down my elbow, I started laughing to myself. Thanks goodness there were no other witnesses.

I was my grandmother.

This year was to be a good year for tomatoes, So, in mid-spring, I went to the co-op to purchase six Atkinson’s acidy tomatoes. However, I went home with a couple of Atkinsons, six Rutgers, about that many Big Boys, three Cherokee Purples, a large, potted cherry tomato plant and six cucumber plants.

I did not need that many tomato plants.

But I had a vision of being a little girl again, standing in my granny’s garden eating tomatoes right off the vine. Oh, how sweet and tart and good they were. I wanted to go back to fresh tomato time.

I did and I have been blessed with an abundant tomato harvest. Some folks say don’t plant squash because you can’t give them away. Touche la tomato! 

For a while, I was happy with the abundant harvest, with a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich at suppertime. The sandwich gave way to a salad with garden-fresh tomatoes, then a toasted bacon, tomato and cheese open face sandwich and then just a plain tomato sandwich. I ate tomatoes with rice, peas and corn and beans. I grilled tomatoes and dried tomatoes, fried them and fed them to the feral cat.

A last measure was to withhold the water but Mother Nature turned on her faucet.

No matter, the tomato plants grudging kept producing. So, I did what must be done.

I did as I had seen my grandmother to so many times, I ate kitchen sink tomatoes. I ate them like daily dose of medicine: Two tomatoes in the morning; two in the afternoon and two at bedtime.

And at each dosage, I ate them like what my granny called –kitchen sink tomatoes. Lean over the kitchen sink, take a big bite and let the tomato juice run streaming down your arm and drip off you elbow into the kitchen sink. I’m also out of tomatoes.

For those who are suffering with an over-abundance of tomatoes, I recommend the kitchen sink method of cure. But FYI: Too much tomato juice will blister your skin. Like a rash. I recommend calamine lotion.