Tomatoes!

Every year, for three seasons of the year, we buy those pink, plastic, pseudo-tomatoes at the grocery store, the ones you put in salads to add a little color or on hamburgers because hamburgers should have tomatoes on them.

And I think they are pretty much pointless, and the only reason for tomatoes is tradition.

And then each summer, we grow tomatoes, and I realize that, after all, tomatoes are really tasty, and I really like them.

This year, we have tomatoes early because a great, sprawling, and by now kind of ugly and out of control, vine of them lived through the winter, and it has started to produce and ripen. They aren't the best tomatoes we ever grew, but they are tomatoes, real tomatoes with real flavor.

So there's a reason we keep them around.