fallen things

   The older I get the more I think I about connections between happenstance and unplanned events. For example, there are the over ripened tomatoes, unpicked as I tended to my mother's death, and fallen on the ground with the first heavy rainfall in months - it came on the day of the funeral. I picked the tomatoes up off the ground this morning, sorry that they were looking so grim but then I thought I should just cook them all right away. And so it was that I found a recipe for homemade tomato paste. I chopped up the tomatoes and put them into a large kettle to simmer. After they were really soft I put them through a sieve and poured them into pans that I placed in the oven.
  After a while they had cooked down so that there was barely anything left. I scraped up the paste that was all that remained from 7 pounds of tomatoes and put it in four 4 very small jars that I processed in a boiling water bath. I always feel happy when I look at jars of newly canned food cooling on the counter. The recipe said I might get as few as three jars if I used really juicy heirloom tomatoes or as much as 6 jars if the tomatoes were thick but the recipe also called for a full 10 pounds of tomatoes when I only had 7 so I was pleased to get four jars. (I guess I should tell you that I burned some of the sauce when I laid down to rest and fell sleep and forgot about them so really four jars was great!)
  When I think about all the tomatoes it took to make the tomato paste and I then consider all the tomato paste in little tin cans in the supermarket and the amount of tomatoes it takes to make all that tomato paste,  I am surprised that anyone ever thought to cook the tomatoes that way in the first place. Then again, what else would you do with all those bits and pieces of tomatoes not nice enough to put on the shelf or even to slice up at home? It is then that I think that someone somewhere just like me once picked up fallen tomatoes, chopped them and put them in the oven or by the fire and when they remembered, the tomatoes that were left in the pan were a dark brick color and sticky like paste, but oh so nice to add to thin soups or sauces to thicken them for a cool weather meal.
  I like growing my own vegetables. If the weather gets too cold for the rest of the tomatoes to ripen I have a nice recipe for green tomato relish and another that I am excited to try for green tomato pickles.
Everything has a use. The fallen tomatoes that smooshed into the ground will enrich the soil for next year. Even our own fallen bodies lying in the ground are useful in the cycle of life.