It’s no secret I’m not that fond of deep winter freezes and plowing snow in January. But I will admit it has been a little warm lately, to the point where I am considering applying deodorant. Like, you know, we wear a mask not to protect ourselves but those around us? It’s been kinda sweaty and my collared knit shirts are like towels. I’m not complaining. I love summer. It’s just…do we need to pay more attention to this heat? Can we really see the world changing if we look closely enough, slowly enough? Like the proverbial frog in the warming pot? I think this train has left the station.

Yet, the heat brings out the best in a tomato. Heat makes them grow like weeds (if they have enough water) and sunlight helps them ripen. I think, in the past, I have written of my time in the great tomato fields of Italy, south of Naples, tomatoes growing in the ash of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that buried Pompeii. The tomato plants are over your head, tied to wire structures as if they were grapes. Once a day the farmer fires up his portable pump and pumps water from a well and irrigates by flooding his crop one row at a time, filling a foot wide channel with the warming water and using his bare feet to open the next row, the next channel across the field, watering the feet of the plants with actions of his own.

From that experience I have all my tomato plants tied-up this year. Some of them are tied to wire grids like chicken wire strapped to metal posts, and some are lifted and tied to sheets of mason concrete reinforcement wire, while others are held up by the Florida-weave of garden string between oak stakes. It all takes time. It’s harder work than you might think. A farmer needs to be able to bend over for long stretches. The human back is a remarkable thing. I’m thankful mine still works after all these years of lifting stones and mortar and bushels of potatoes and firewood.

There’s not much else like being in a field of tomatoes. I happen to love the smell of tomato plants and their shades of green from deep forest green, to turquoise, to yellow-green, are lovely to watch grow. Most plants try to hide their fruit and often I’m walking on my knees, on the soft (and not so soft!) leaf-mold we use for mulch, picking tomatoes from the lower reaches of the plant, virtually invisible to a standing, walking creature.

Having the deer fence operational is a vast improvement. And with our modifications, we have kept out the muskrats. But, there’s something in there! Evidence of partly chewed tomatoes in the center of the rows lends evidence to a small mammal, chipmunk? Mouse? Shrew? Mole?

Tomatoes aren’t the only thing that is green this time of year. Christopher Hitchens, in his book, god is not Great, relates an interesting dialogue he had with one of his elementary school teachers about why humans love the color green. That conversation, the internal debate it sparked, he credits with being the basis of his emerging belief system. That that issue of why humans love green, was the foundation of everything he came to believe, and not believe, about God and the Universe. Check it out sometime. Good summer reading in the bosom of our green months.