Our CSA is in the height of U-pick season: the time of year when the distribution area in the barn is eerily empty because everyone is out in the field, ankle-deep in dirt, harvesting pint after pint of raspberries, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, husk cherries, and whatever else is boisterously bearing fruit.

When we signed up for our share this year, one thing we were most excited about was the possibility of picking our own tomatoes for canning. By “canning” I mean freezing, because I’m still somewhat afraid of the (very great) possibility of completely screwing up the canning process and, as a result, poisoning myself, Dan, and anyone else who’s dared to take a meal with us. The plum tomatoes are suddenly ripe for the taking, so this week I happily marched into the fields with a five gallon spackle bucket and proceeded to pick plum tomatoes in the company of several happy bumble bees and grandmothers. “Happy picking,” said the farm apprentice, as I trotted out of the distribution area, bucket in hand. “And happy canning!” she added somewhat ominously.

Here’s where I note another sort of “worst of both worlds” moment. Really, it’s the same root problem borne out over many moments: living here, in the country, trying to do some country things, without the community of support that comes, I suppose, with living here for a long, long time.

Which is to say that it was damn hard — and time consuming — to turn 14 pounds of plum tomatoes into a giant vat of tomato sauce.

Really, it was the chopping. Oh, the endless, merciless chopping. As I quartered and diced the tomatoes, I thought about what it might have been like three or four generations ago: if my grandmother — or, more likely, Dan’s — had been processing tomatoes for canning, what might it have looked like? I imagined a hot kitchen, aproned women with braids or short, simple hairdos; friends, aunts, generations, all chopping together, piling those translucent red chunks in a big ceramic bowl. You know the saying, many hands…

I don’t know what it was like for people before me, or what it’s like for people now, people who are old hands, people with a network of canning-savvy pals ready to spend the weekend gossiping in the kitchen while turning summer into something they can use in the white-out of January. Instead, I made the task a sort of Zen exercise:

Halve
Slice, slice, slice
Dice
Scoop

and before too terribly long, I was done.

The reward? (Aside from a knife-induced repetitive stress injury?) In the now, the still-lingering aroma of tomatoes, garlic, onion, and basil. And in January — if it lasts that long — the sweet taste of summer tomatoes.