The local tomato season, the period during which one can buy good, local tomatoes grown outdoors, is now over. In the Washington, DC, area, the season begins about the beginning of July and now runs until about the middle of October. Of course one can buy tomatoes in the stores all year, but they are bred for shipping rather than for eating: they will not bruise under reasonable handling; they have very little taste.
During the tomato season, my wife will come home with bags from a local farmers market. We will have a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato (BLT) sandwiches many weeks. Most Fridays we will have roasted tomatoes over fettucini. She has frozen some roasted tomatoes for a treat to be enjoyed between now and next July. The BLTs, though, are over until then.
The night this year after she first brought home bags of tomatoes, I woke in the dark hours thinking that I smelled smoke. Of course the smoke alarms are more sensitive than a nose, certainly more sensitive than mine, but that did not occur to me. After walking about the house and sniffing, I went back to bed. In the morning it occurred to me that it was the unfamiliar smell of fresh tomatoes that I had taken for smoke.
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