Tomato Haiku

As I was processing my bounty from the garden today, I wrote a Haiku:

Box of tomatoes
Hot sweat dripping down my back
At least it's not cheese

The story behind this is that 2 years ago, my dear friends Jen and Barb let me talk them into learning to make mozzarella. Jen, who works at a dairy farm, got the milk and on the hottest day of the summer, we made cheese. Wait, it gets better. The twins were all of 8 months old and wanted to be held AND we were at Jen's house where the A/C was either not on or was broken or they don't have it, we've never really discerned which one. When you make fresh mozzarella, it involves a lot of heat. Not just passive heat, you have to touch hot cheese to knead it and you have to stand over boiling vats of milk waiting for the right things to happen at the right times. So we did the standing and the observing and the kneading all without A/C, on the hottest day of the year while slinging 8 month old clingy, whiny twins. Getting the picture?

We somehow had a ton of fun doing all of this and when we were all finished, I packed up all of my children (because I'm the lady with the bunch of kids), the sitter who had been outside watching the older kids in the pool, my cheese, and headed out the door. We got everyone into the car and....it won't start. Seriously? So, I go back into the house where my dear friends, who are not as happy to see me as they were a few hours before, assist me in calling a tow truck and a car rental place so I could get my car to the shop and get everyone home. It took awhile but they finally arrived, we got the car seats strapped into the rental car and headed home while my car (which of course started at the shop just fine) was towed.

What a day. It definitely lives on in my memory and those of my dear friends and when I'm processing a big box of tomatoes on an 85 degree day without my A/C on while sweat drips down my back I think, "at least it's not cheese!"