Bites

I’m currently listening to Aimee Nezhukumatathil read Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, her most recent book of essays. Each short reflection, poem, and memory is related to the foods – prepared, cut, or plucked – that have stuck with her mixed amongst botanical observations and moments of gardening and growing. It is a beautiful mashup of things I love – food, family, friendship, and ways of knowing – in lyrical reflection.

Her writing is top of mind tonight as I stand by the stove, mixing together a meal out of the bounty grown for me by my favorite farmers. We’ve reached the part of the year when I stretch to add vegetables to everything, at constant risk of getting behind the box that is refilled each Saturday.

Cutting orange-red tomatoes that finished ripening in a brown paper bag on the counter to the point of firm sweetness, arraying them on a small rimmed plate to chill before dinner, twisting salt onto each piece on my plate, watching my children attempt to cut through skins with their forks, dripping juice and smiling at their first tastes of summer. Remembering all the plates of sliced tomatoes on the too-small but somehow just right kitchen table at my parents’ house, where my knees knocked my brothers’ and we learned to chill and salt and savor from my dad, whose relationship with tomatoes is one that goes back to a youth’s worth of summers tending, suckering, harvesting, and eating. Who now cannot eat them without sneezing but still has a slice or two because they are summer.