My friend Cindy is always a little sad when the rudbeckia bloom because in Michigan, she says, it means summer is almost over. But Labor Day is no longer the benchmark it once was, not even for schoolchildren, who are increasingly likely to go back to class in August. No one would say summer is over in August. And this year frost is not predicted for southeast Michigan until November, so I think she has plenty of summer left.

So do the fawns. I’m told they’re mostly born in June, but we don’t see them foraging in our yard until mid-July, and more of them in August. They will lose those spotted markings as they grow their winter coats, usually starting in September. It will be interesting to see when that happens this year.

But of course August is also the big month for tomatoes. Such an inspiring fruit, in its masquerade as a vegetable and its ability to make anything delicious. What would bacon and lettuce be without it? How would spaghetti manage? Whatever did they eat in Italy before tomatoes arrived from the New World? Here are my “indigo” tomatoes, that fool the squirrels, a harvest with basil, and a poem I wrote to celebrate them all.

Bumper Crop

Tomato abundance
startles the garden,
sizes, shapes, colors of them
never seen before,
tiger-striped, pink, black,
scarlet and heavy inside,
sturdy stakes bend to the ground,
tomatoes roll, they press
against the garden gate,
spring it open,
bowl over timid rabbits,
swamp the woodchuck,
pelt the curious deer,
tomatoes sweep the drive,
to Honey Creek,
to the Huron River,
they bob with canoes and kayaks,
crest the dam at Barton Pond,
shoot the cataracts at Argo,
laugh at joggers, at trains,
the pylons of highways,
Ypsilanti here they come,
a flood in Ford territory,
they flow past the airport,
burst into Lake Erie
and out the other side,
the Erie Canal, the Hudson River,
the Atlantic Ocean,
tomatoes, tomatoes,
red tide of tomatoes,
to England, to Iceland,
to the Arctic Ocean,
feed the polar bears,
thread the floes, Murmansk,
the North Slope, Nunavut,
Hudson Bay, the Canadian Shield,
the Mackinac Straits,
hitch-hike from Saginaw,
roll down the median of Highway 23,
tomatoes, tomatoes,
welcome home, tomatoes,
a tumult of sunshine
swells your skin,
one bite and out leaps
every kind of summer,
ninety-three million miles of red light
in a single burst.