in the air

Ah, it's that time of year. Days are getting shorter... Animals are turning their thoughts southward or towards fattening up (at least in some places)... Kiddles and those of you on the semester system are preparing for a first day back at school (yay for quarters!)... And here in the Central Valley farmers are harvesting their ripened crops.

One of the big crops around here is tomatoes. And I'm lucky enough to live a mere 3 blocks from a tomato processing plant. So after a year long respite, the aroma of tomatoes is once again in the air. (Just a thing. Not good or bad, but leaning towards the pleasant side.) So my town is something of a mecca for tomato trucks. For the next couple months it won't be uncommon to see double-long trucks of tomatoes lumbering around. And considering the mountains of tomatoes they pile into these trucks, it isn't the least bit surprising that there are tomatoes littering the sides of roads (most common however on turns, entrances and exits to freeways, and windy days).

This evening I was on the final 10 mile leg of my journey home from Santa Barbara (more on that later). I was forced to merge onto the highway behind a tomato truck. Silly me: I figured this was an OK place to be. The truck was going roughly the speed I wanted to go (slow (better gas mileage that way), but not too slow), and I thought that since it was mostly good and straight for the 10 miles until my exit (the Central Valley is a topographically very boring place to be), there shouldn't be any problems with tomato hail. What little I knew! Well, I suppose it was a relatively decent assumption. Things went smoothly for a minute or so. Then a precarious tomato (but only one!) was propelled off of the mountain top and sailed towards me. Happily, I was far enough behind the truck (one one thousand, two one thousand...) so as not to be clobbered by the tomato. The tomato itself didn't seem to mind this misfortune too much either. These tomatoes are fresh from the field, mind you, good and taut. So it bounced a couple times (boingy boingy boingy), which amused me greatly. Who knew that tomatoes would bounce?! =) That answers a lifelong mystery for quite a few of us, I'm sure. Unfortunately, the structural integrity of tomatoes does not hold after two or three bounces, regardless of ripeness.

Splat! And now there are drops of tomato juice, and a seed or two for good measure, on Steggie's windshield. So it goes. So it goes.