There is a moment every year when tomatoes begin to taste different. They are still warm from the sun, still heavy in the hand, still carrying that particular sweetness that belongs to summer. What changes is that you know there will not be many more of them.
By September, the tomato I sliced without thinking in July suddenly feels more precious. I notice the color. I add just enough salt. I eat it a little more slowly. Maybe there is basil nearby that is beginning to look tired around the edges, and somehow that makes the whole thing feel even more like the season it came from.
I have been thinking about this lately because we spend so much of life trying to make good things last. We preserve, protect, refrigerate, freeze, photograph, save. We buy another one before the first is gone. We become very good at extending things, as though permanence were the highest compliment we could pay them.
But some pleasures become more vivid because they cannot be extended forever. The last tomatoes of summer are wonderful precisely because they are the last tomatoes of summer. If they were available in exactly the same way every day of the year, something would disappear. Not the flavor, perhaps, but the anticipation. The gratitude. The little feeling of urgency that says, pay attention, this will not be here much longer.
That is one of the things I love about living with seasons. They remind us that abundance is not the same thing as permanence. August can feel endless while you are inside it: long evenings, warm breezes, flowers everywhere, fresh fruit appearing on the kitchen counter faster than anyone can eat it. Then September arrives and begins changing the composition almost imperceptibly. The light shifts. The evenings shorten. Something in the air sharpens. The market looks slightly different from one week to the next. Nothing dramatic has happened, and yet everything is moving.
I don’t find this melancholy. I find it clarifying. It reminds me that beauty doesn’t have to last forever in order to be complete. We sometimes confuse permanence with value. If something is good, we want to hold onto it. If something makes us happy, we want another season of it, another year, another version just like the first. But perhaps part of living beautifully is learning not to grip quite so tightly. The ending wakes us up.
And of course, this is about more than tomatoes. There are rooms we won’t live in forever, people we won’t always be able to call, traditions that will change shape, objects that will eventually chip or break, seasons of our own lives that pass so gradually we do not realize they have ended until we are already somewhere else.
None of these realities makes them less beautiful. Maybe it makes them more so.
The real challenge becomes the ability to recognize the season while you are still inside it. We are always looking ahead: planning the next trip, the next home, the next dinner, the next project, the next season. We are remarkably skilled at standing in one moment while thinking about another.
The last tomatoes ask something different of us. They ask us to stay where we are long enough to taste what is here before reaching for what comes next. So, I will eat them while I can. I will slice them too thick, add a little salt, maybe drizzle some olive oil, maybe nothing at all. And I will try not to wish they lasted longer. I will remain in the present and enjoy it's gift.
Happily Ever Always™.
