Hardy Plants

Somebody at my wife's office gave her a tomato plant early in the summer, some heirloom variety of which she didn't even know the name.

The plant, in a back yard whiskey barrel pot, blossomed, and gave us tomatoes all summer long. Tasty, tart, and a salad or sandwich made with a tomato you picked two minutes before you constructed it is way better than one using a tomato that was chemically-ripened in a California hothouse weeks earlier ...

Normally, by the end of September, tomatoes from the garden are done, picked clean and the the plant is ready to be pulled up. This one, whatever it is, still has a slew of green tomatoes on it. They won't get enough sun to ripen, but we can make salsa or chutney or even fry 'em, if we get them off before the first freeze.

The plant is putting out new flowers. Apparently it doesn't know that it's November around here.

And with the rain coming down, I am sitting in my office with (what I hope is only) a cold. I do all the things one is supposed to do, hand-washing, etc., but now and then, some bug slips through. Entire time I worked at a medical clinic, with thousands of infectious patients coming through every year, I never caught the flu, not even a cold, and I got used to the idea I was invulnerable.

So much for the notion of being Immune Man ...

Ah, well. If I practice singing today, I can sing Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song and hit the low bass notes ...