Sam Sifton in the New York Times Sunday magazine rhapsodizes on last of summer tomatoes – “Wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty.”

He goes on: “What you want from those tomatoes: heft….The taste should run sweet, with a bang of acidity.”

Is that not just how you want to be described?

How about this? A garden writer urges her backyard farmers to not give up on the older plants just because they seem to slow down and get a little wrinkled at the end of summer. Never mistake them for being unproductive, wrote Maureen Gilmer, in a story distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

Making the link between late season veggies and their human counterparts, Gilmer noted that we rarely see pictures of food gardens this time of year because they’re not as pretty and shiny as they are in early summer.

But she urges, “A well tended tomato plant will age gracefully, remaining active late in life, just like we do.”

That’s my kind of metaphor. Juicy Tomatoes – ripe, a little sun damaged, but still on the vine. It gives me encouragement when I look in the mirror or have another birthday.

So when I come across like-minded images I scribble them down.

From a poem called “Tomato” by Robert Samarotto.
“Filling ourselves with sun saying – take me- take me.
Limbs bowed under the weight of us. We endured the harshness of the season and waited our turn – waited our turn.”

And this quote that someone sent me with a picture of “The Great Tomato Diva” by artist Lynn Pollock Marsh.
“Look beyond cosmetic appearance. Look to the soul, its nutrition. Ripeness is all.”

Stay juicy, my friends.

I don’t try anymore to create sweet tea. My attempts always ended up with a sugary sludge at the bottom. I don’t have the right geography for it. There is no replicating the sweet iced tea I ordered happily by mistake one soggy morning in Savannah, Ga. And then glugged for sustenance all weekend during my daughter’s wedding in Memphis.

The fast food places in my town whose billboards promise sweet tea can’t provide an actual sweet tea experience. For that you have to be in the south where people wear white clothes as thin as a summer curtain and sit as still as a plate of okra. Where you station yourself on a porch or in a restaurant with ceiling fans that nudge the lazy air and everyone is glistening and rosy. To be saved by a woman who saunters over to your table to pour you the most quenching, tallest, coolest drink, better than any alcohol ever, which lets you know that you are truly in a foreign land but will now survive the endless, sticky day.

No zucchini before its time.

In California I don’t really need sweet tea. I don’t need to quench. A chilled sauvignon blanc from a local winery pairs perfectly with our summers. When I crave sweet tea I probably need to leave home.

Back East I get to eat Ipswich clams, dug by my nephew that morning, steamed in a dented pot by my sister, to be piled in a communal bowl and convivially slurped by family members plus babies and dogs as the sun shimmers across the salt marsh. Nowhere else can I get clams or a moment like that.

Now I’m thinking that one healthy result from the current gas crunch is that our palates, numbed by cross country road trips and freeway food, may come alive again. There will be renewed opportunity to eat and drink where we are planted.

Dive into the chicken-fried steak when you’re in Missouri. Hold off on barbequed oysters until you’re in California. No zucchini before its time. And keep it simple.

I dream of the cheese and tomato sandwiches on soft bread they used to sell at a snack booth on Crane Beach, north of Boston. The cheese was orange. The bread was non-artisan. But the tomato tasted like it came from the farm stand on the beach road.

It was unadorned and perfect, like the sandwich your mother would have waiting when you ran shivering from the water.
Plain food. Lasting memory.