August

Summer's Longest Month

Monday, July 31

Jamie unfolds a six-foot table in the living room, releasing its legs one at a time. I hear the metal supports lock into place– one, click, two, click, three, click, four. It’s tomato table time, which means August. Summer’s longest month. Outside, the farm girls and Jamie inch their start times earlier and earlier to try and beat the heat. Inside, black crates of tomatoes fill the space beneath the table before being stacked one on top of the other like a game of Jenga. A kaleidoscopic assortment bearing names like Tasmanian Chocolate, Speckled Roman, Yellow Perfection, Jaune Flamme, and Piennolo litter the tabletop covered in an old sheet patterned with blue snowflakes. Electric stripes of the Speckled Roman, bright orange and yellow, lime green and red, make them shout from their living room perch. Green buckets filled with candy sweet cherry tomatoes– yellow, red, and orange– line the table’s edge. The tomato table is tradition, a marker of the season, of the sweetness and labor of August, its fleeting taste. 

“Just a little bit further,” we wink to each other. A much needed break is coming. But not this month. August is tomatoes, ripe and ready, and waiting for no one.

Friday, August 4

Jamie’s birthday falls on a Friday. At farm lunch we make a half-sheet tray of birthday nachos showered with cilantro, layered with beans, cheese and sour cream, dolloped with Jamie’s homemade red salsa, direct from the tomato table. In the hustle of Friday production, I throw together an easy lemon pound cake topped with squiggles of cream cheese icing, blobs of blueberry jam, and calendula petals. We entertain Jamie with our traditional birthday blessing– the birthday haiku. Everybody writes one for the celebrant du jour and we read them aloud. 

Cat Daddy. Plant Pop, 

Pup Pup King, farmer heartthrob.

Falls asleep by nine. 

Today, farm lunch is the small reprieve amidst our busiest day prepping for Saturday markets. Taco party on Sunday to celebrate the occasion properly.

Saturday, August 5

Our friend Luis just returned from a month in Mexico and came over to help us season the comal gifted to Jamie for his birthday by local potter and friend, Ron Philbeck. Somehow I am always standing over the baking bench when Luis walks in the door and I am reminded what it is I am doing with this one precious life. “You guys never stop,” exclaims Luis. 

Jamie picked up a bag of cal from the tienda which he’ll use to cure the comal, a process of tempering the clay vessel for cooking. The two grab some corn husks and a slurry made of the cal and water and head outside. On the stovetop, a pot of charro beans sits parcooked and ready for seasonings. The chicken for tinga awaits recado rojo. Luis and Jamie place the comal on a propane burner in the gravel driveway and slowly turn on the heat. Luis uses the corn husk to brush the comal with cal. They do this in the dusty pastel of twilight until the night sky turns electric blue, dark but illuminated by the residual summer sun. Kiki, our farm cat, wends her way around the scene, tail twitching back and forth, happy for the company. 

Sunday, August 6

Instead of our single Sunday of rest, we throw a party. Jamie says he likes to give back on his birthday, thus he feeds people. We have charro beans and chicken tinga, and fresh tortillas made by Luis. Our friend Joel came early to make tacos suadero from a beautiful slab of beef he bought from some farmer friends. Our friend and meat magician, Jonathan, brings red and green chorizo that he made plus a giant sobrasada as a gift. Farm gal Liz brings tomato rice and Hailey, another Leo celebrant and bakery helper, arrives with the most colorful ceviche. In the kitchen, I make two giant sheets of tres leches cake made of hazelnut sponge and the requisite three milks. A lemon bundt, made special for Hailey, is brushed generously with lemon syrup until it glistens. We set up a Badminton net and drink cucumber aguas frescas made with the most recent harvest. Cumbia pulsates through the outdoor pavilion and we celebrate. We’re tired, but we celebrate anyway. 

Monday, August 14

Tomatoes don’t go into the refrigerator lest we compromise the integrity of these summer fruits, but this means a ticking clock. Some of the tomatoes from the tomato table will be sold, but others will not and we will need to find something to do with them. Already some are soft in places. Juices spill from the breaches, leaking through the crate, leaving small bronze-brown puddles. Every time I look, Jamie is roasting another round of tomatoes for salsa. I open the oven and find a hotel pan full of charred onions, peppers, and tomatoes. I look again and he is blanching, peeling, canning tomatoes for sauce. He stews the tomatoes and runs them through the food mill. I make tomato tarts with roasted tomatoes and a chutney made of more tomatoes, a menu item that will appear again and again in different iterations before month’s end. I blanch, peel and salt fresh tomatoes for an extra layer of flavor. I dehydrate the skins and buzz them with salt. Tomato salt. Preservation work in the summertime is another full-time job on top of  long days in the field and in the bakery. We scramble to use them up. I collect the rotten tomatoes and throw them in the compost.

Tuesday, August 15

Two. That’s the number of markets left until we catch a break over the Labor Day weekend. Motivation is hard to come by these days. Even the farm girls, who are as effervescent as they come, are humorless. When the new week begins, I negotiate start times with myself, wishing I could call the bakery team off, or at least delay their arrival until noon. But that never happens. We work anyway. I tell myself the repetition is conditioning us for the holiday season. I tell myself we will bake ourselves out of this very lean place. I am buoyed by the fruit of the moment–peaches and blackberries, raspberries, figs and, of course, the tomatoes. Just a little bit further, we say. 

Sunday, August 20

Instead of our single Sunday of rest, we throw a pie party. This time, over 100 people come to the farm. There is a mini-market with local vendors and local organizations, and loads of sweet and savory pie made by me and my friend Camille. At the end of the day, Jamie and I collapse into the couch. We split the mini coconut cream pie that Camille set aside for us. Jamie is snoring before I finish my half.

Wednesday, August 23

Record-breaking heat. Historic rainfall. Wildfires. Apocalyptic reports from Lahaina. Raining fire. Smoke in the Carolinas from fires in Canada. The Earth is dying, I think. No, it is being destroyed. I am always worried. They call it climate anxiety nowadays. I stand over my baking table and cry as I listen to survivor accounts of the Maui fires. I hold the tension between thinking what we do in this miniscule place matters and the overwhelming feeling that the damage we’ve done is irreparable. I hear scientists sounding the alarm bells, but don’t see enough people answering the call. 

Saturday, August 26

Today is the last market of high summer. I’ve had three hours of sleep, but am alive with the energy one feels before a big trip, or during that last week of school. The end is in sight. A new season’s ahead. I tell market customers we will be absent the next couple of weeks. I grab a nap in the afternoon, bringing my total hours of sleep to five, then dress myself for dinner in a friend’s backyard. We feast on a refreshing melon salad with lots of lime and salt; orzo pasta tossed with pesto, tomatoes, and roasted zucchini; a peach and chile tart, and homemade bread, soft and chewy and slathered with butter. The summer air leaves a glowy satisfaction on our cheekbones. We linger and tell stories underneath a single string of lights, underneath a golden summer sky, underneath the slow passing of clouds. I feel free. 

Monday, August 28 

A chattering chorus of cicadas reverberates across the lawn. One of them attaches itself to the drain pipe and lets it rip, my own personal show. I slept until 8:45 this morning. August is nearly over.

The work of August, Jamie says, feels like a double-dutch jumprope in record-breaking heat. It is the duality of summer harvest and fall plantings, of holding joy in one hand and grief in the other. August stretches itself, in heat and time. It is long days, sunlit and oppressive, self-motivated but not. The land demands our attention. The chug of markets leaves little choice.

August is spotting a hummingbird in the tithonia, its vibrational magic fleeting like the tomatoes. August is shade and water, sweat and salt, life and death. It is a time to root into the present moment, to tell ourselves we can do hard things. We can capture the ripeness of a tomato even while others rot. We can love this world in spite of the damage that’s been done. We can plod on together, bedraggled and imperfect. We can make it through August. We can make it just a little bit further.