Tomatoes ripening on a windowsill mean it's late summer in the Midwest.
Tomatoes ripening on a windowsill mean it's late summer in the Midwest.
I know when it’s late summer
Every season has its hallmarks. There’s early summer, full summer and late summer, just as there are the same for fall, winter and spring.
It’s mid-August now, so I’m appreciating late summer. It’s easy to tell late summer here in Southern Illinois. Note I said Southern Illinois, not downstate Illinois. Downstate is anything outside of Chicago and its immediate metro area. Southern Illinois is an area defined by its residents, not by outsiders.
Geographically it’s the southern third of Illinois.
Culturally it begins somewhere around the line drawn by Interstate 70 from the Mississippi River to the Indiana border. The further south one goes the further south the cultural border moves. So, folks in Cairo, the very southern tip at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers think Carbondale isn’t Southern Illinois. Cairo is after all several hours closer to Memphis than it is to Chicago and about the same distance to the State of Mississippi as it is to Effingham.
Then, of course, the industrial/suburban counties bordering St. Louis are excluded by true Southern Illinoisans from the appellation “Southern Illinois” as the folks who live there are “city folk”, part of the region known as “Metro-east”. If it’s “metro”, it ain’t Southern Illinois. Thus, folks who live in Effingham up on Interstate 70, can be considered Southern Illinoisans, even though they’re north of Belleville, whose residents are definitely NOT considered true Southern Illinoisans.
In fact, Bellevilleans likely don’t want to be considered Southern Illinoisans as their rural cousins are nearly as lowly as Hoosiers. While residents of Indiana may take pride in being called Hoosiers, in St. Louis and the Metro-east, there are few insults graver than calling someone a Hoosier. The derision likely results from the early and mid-twentieth century when poor rural whites from Southern Indiana migrated to work in the factories of St. Louis. The rural Hoosiers far less sophisticated than the city dwellers of what was then America’s third largest city.
I digress. With my mother’s family from Wayne County and my Dad’s from Cumberland County, an undergraduate degree from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and a law degree from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, it’s hard for me to consider myself anything but a Southern Illinoisan…even though I live, and have lived for nearly forty years, in Belleville. My wife, a native Bellevillean is clearly NOT a Southern Illinoisan. Old-line Bellevilleans are German, while old-line Southern Illinoisans are English-Scots-Irish. The German Bible inherited from her grand-parents, along with their wedding license in German, although it was signed by the St. Paul E and R Church pastor right here in Belleville proves the point.
Likewise, my Ancestry.com report showing the vast majority of my DNA emanated from those islands perched off the northwest coast of Europe show me to be the son of Southern Illinois.
We have much different customs. For example, we Southern Illinoisans fry potatoes in bacon grease, in fact we fry most everything in bacon grease. Wife Annette (odd name for a German girl), but maybe the Annette is explained by her middle name-Alsace the province Germany and France have been fighting over for centuries, sautees things in olive oil. Well she does cook okra in bacon grease, but even then, its “sautéed” not fried.
She has other odd habits too. She picks up katydid skins, which were they larger would feature in horror films as the leavings of creatures about to devour fleeing humans. She then takes the katydid skins with their pointed claws and puts them on the front screen door. Right at eyeball height.
Every night in late July and August, while walking the dog, she’ll peer at every tree on the block searching for the abandoned husks. Finding one she’ll carefully cradle it in the palm of her hand until she can wedge the claws into the tiny holes of the screen.
Some years are better katydid years than others. This year, like all else with the Covid pandemic it’s not been a good year for the katydids. Thus, Annette has only found three of the horrid looking little carapaces to stick on the door. Guests, FedEx and UPS drivers, not to mention the postal delivery folks are invariably startled by the sight of dead bugs on the screen door.
What causes this strange predilection? Darned if I know. She only says, “Well, Mimi did it.” Mimi being our younger son’s nickname for her, now departed, dearly beloved mother.
As for what inspired Mimi to place the skins on our front screen door we’ll never know, but we’d frequently open the door, during the waning days of summer, to find the hulls staring us in the eye. They invariable delighted young Alex, as he pointed his little fingers at them and cried out: “Boogs, mommy, Boogs.”
In all my days of crisscrossing Southern Illinois, I’ve never seen anyone else put insect shells on their front door. Deer antlers over the barn door? Yes. Snake skins on the back porch? Yes. Turtle shells in the garden? Yes. Katydid husks on the screen door? No.
Of course, the other way to tell it’s late summer, is the line of green tomatoes on the kitchen window sill. They’ve fallen off the vine and placed there to ripen, so the squirrels don’t take that lone bite out of them, ruining them for human consumption.
Tomatoes ripening on a kitchen window sill are seen on late summer days throughout Southern Illinois, and maybe all over the country for all I know. Our tomato patch is a bit different than most in Southern Illinois, though. First of all, Annette wants tomatoes of every color and size. We have yellow tomatoes, orange tomatoes and red tomatoes. We have cherry tomatoes. We have plum tomatoes. We have beefsteak tomatoes. She’s never met a tomato plant she didn’t like.
None of that is particularly unusual. Lots of folks like variety in their tomatoes. What’s unusual is that we live in the city. That is a city for Southern Illinois. Belleville is a town of about 45,000 people. It’s the largest town south of Springfield, the state capital and home of Abraham Lincoln. So, folks in Southern Illinois consider it a city. It’s also part of the St. Louis metropolitan area so that makes it a city too.
Our lot is 75x120 feet, by the time you take out space for a house, a two-car garage with storage room, concrete patio, sidewalks and my blackberry bushes with thorns, which produce approximately twelve berries per year, half of which get eaten by birds or squirrels, there’s not a whole lot of room for tomato plants.
Since Annette gardens standing up, the tomato plants are in a clawfoot, cast-iron bathtub next to the kitchen porch. And in a pair of galvanized wash-tubs standing next to the cellar door. And in the wooden veg trugs perched here and there.
Now all of those sites aren’t quite enough space for the tomato plants she’s purchased from the local nursery. So I agree to take custody of another half dozen or so and plant them next to my compost bin, hidden from front view by the rhododendron plant with it’s springtime blooms and waxy leaves.
Since the compost bin spills its rich black soil enhancer around its base, the tomato plants thrive. By midsummer they’ve long outgrown their wire cages and threaten the neighbors immaculate gravel covered flower beds. To appease the trespass, we provide the neighbors with cups of cherry tomatoes for their summer salads.
Even after planting around my compost bin, there are still tomato plants needing a home. The orphans are loaded up and transported to our weekend cottage overlooking the Mississippi River, where they’ll be adopted by our ninety-year-old, Korean War veteran neighbor, who labors in his garden daily.
He tells us the gifted tomato plants are better than the ones he gets across the river in Perryville, Missouri. He gifts us weekly with cucumbers, green beans and yet more tomatoes!
We’ll miss those tomatoes come December…and even more in January and February as the gray winter drags on. It won’t be until the promise of spring that Annette will be buying more tomato plants. And more tomato plants. And more tomato plants. Come August the window sills will be lined once again with green tomatoes basking in the sun.
(c) William Enyart 2020
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com