Week 8 Theme - Vignettes

Every fall we had to deal with the tomatoes.  I hated it.  The days were growing shorter and shorter and winter was knocking at the door.  The warmth of the slanting golden light threatened to fade away in a few weeks.  These were weekends not to be wasted.  These were weekends that should be spent playing tag or going for a bike ride or searching for fallen chestnuts.
But every year our parents' words of thinly-veiled threats wrapped around us like chains, binding us to the odious task of helping them harvest the tomatoes.  The sky such a deep blue that only seems to come with fall and winter, the warmth of the day, only added to my agony.  Like a tortured Egyptian slave moving great slabs of stone, I helped to gather tomatoes and carry them inside.
The vines were supported by metal cages, every year weighed down by their globular fruit and needing that extra support.  Many of the tomatoes weren't ready for consumption though.  These we placed in the window sills of the porch, the green and the pale orange ones, lining them up to ripen in the dying sunlight.  A tangy fresh tomato smell clung to my hands as I pulled off each tomato.  I was terribly squeamish of touching tomatoes contaminated by bugs, terrified that the ones with scarred-over holes would suddenly burst forth with worms.  My parents were the down-to-earth gardening weirdos.  I ate normal, clean grocery food.
Of course, there were simply too many tomatoes produced every year for just fresh eating.  Most of these tomatoes would need to be canned.  I don't know which I detested more - picking and laying them out, or being in charge of the plain tomato sauce we prepared on the stove.  A huge black pot would fill with tomato sauce, and my mother would hand me a wooden spoon and I would stir the sauce while it bubbled and steamed.  Dire consequences would occur if I let anything in the pot burn, so I stirred constantly, sweating with anxiety at the thought of ruining an entire massive batch of the sauce.  Scrape, went my spoon, pushing through the thin layer of paste forming on the bottom of the pot.  Up to the surface, around a few times in the thickening liquid, and down again for another scrape.  The stove was adjacent to the kitchen window, and I could see the light and the green of the trees, reminders of how much this weekend was sucking for me.  When you're young, it's all about the drama.
I didn't have to deal with the glass jars and the preservation of the sauce, thank god.  Even now my overactive imagination envisions an explosion of shards permanently blinding me, boiling sauce covering my face and arms.  Better that that sort of thing be left to the experts.
Sweating from the hot, steamy kitchen, the house filled with a rich tomato aroma, the daylight would fade along with my hopes of being able to enjoy it.  My parents would finally come in from their harvesting and fall yard work, all of us calling it quits for the day.  Yet another perfectly good weekend ruined for me.
How many weekends did I spend harvesting and preparing those vile things?  I cannot say.  But how funny our adult minds are, twisting once hated memories into something new.  Now the smell of tomato vines brings back memories of that ever present golden sun, that mouthwatering sauce smell, and a fondness for days gone by.