Only two things that money can’t buy and that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.
– John Denver
Well, that was fast.
You might have noticed those large yellow vehicles making their way up city streets and down neighborhood roads this week, packed with precious classroom-bound cargo. It’s an undeniable sign that, once again, summer is beating a hasty retreat. Once again it seems to have whipped by.
I say let’s do something about that – because, let’s face it, there’s little productive value in End-of-Summer Sadface.
For one thing, this is about the time of year when it becomes abundantly clear to me that it’s impossible to go overboard on the bounty that fills the season’s table. Subsisting on the tomatoes, sweet corn, blueberries and peaches pulled from fields within a few miles of here is a completely doable thing, and I highly recommend doing just that, while we can.
Seriously, people, let’s not let these sunny days slip away any sooner than we must.
If you have a tomato plant or two in the vegetable garden or in pots on the deck, you probably understand this. As the late John Denver so cheerily reminded us, nothing compares with a homegrown tomato. OK, except maybe true love.
And I’m not sure about you, but I’m quite a few ears away from being sick of corn. There are plenty of places to pull over and snag a bagful right now – Wagner Farms, Keller’s Farmstand and Mayneland Farm are just a few of the spots in town where you can find corn for tonight’s dinner that was still tethered to the ground just this morning. I bet one of them is right on your way home.
It’s been a decent year for corn growers so far – and the yummy product shows it. Pam White, who runs Wagner Farms, recently told The Sun’s splendid summer intern, Maggie Angst (Maggie has headed back to school, which presents another temptation to yield to End-of-Summer Sadface) that everything they were putting out was being promptly snapped up, despite the prolific rains and cool temperatures hurting yield volumes a bit.
(An aside: corn’s a personal thing. I get that. Some of us consider the messiness of salty, buttery fingers an indispensable part of the ritual that is relishing a perfectly cooked ear – indeed, we feel a touch slighted if we don’t end up kind of needing a bath afterward. Others can’t fathom chomping down the rows without picks firmly holding each end. This year, thanks to my spouse and his duties as Chef Corn at his company’s annual picnic, I learned that if you leave a few inches of the stem end attached, that right there makes a fine handle. Sometimes a guy surprises you, even after 38 years of blissful togetherness.)
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The blueberries are mighty splendid, too, in case you’ve yet to learn that firsthand. Ditto for the peaches. After a couple of visits to Michigan’s fruit belt in recent weeks, I can report as much, firsthand. Yeah, I’m a lucky girl. And we’re all lucky that the fruit growers turn up at the farmer’s markets at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which runs from 3 to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sept. 16 at Aurora Avenue and West Street, and Saturday’s Naperville Farmer’s Market, setting up every week through Halloween in the Fifth Avenue Station parking lot.
A word of caution: the peaches and blueberries won’t be around forever. You’re welcome.
The truth is, this season won’t wait around for us to notice its myriad loveliness. Whether we gorge ourselves on the local harvest – and yes, we’ll be able to savor the apples, squashes, root vegetables of fall for a few weeks to come, so thanks to Mother Nature for that lovely gift – or just take a moment to put an outing to the Last Fling or a neighborhood or family cookout into our Google calendars, the time for Summer Appreciation Day is now. And no, that’s not an acronym.
Let’s seize these waning lazy, hazy days, shall we?
Twitter @scarlman