The Toasted Tomato

It’s a cozy, rainy day and I’m tucked in the kitchen looking out the window. On the stove, I’ve got chicken broth simmering and its rich, comforting scent has filled up the entire house. This morning, I decided I would finally try my hand at making sourdough bread so I’ve got the starter bubbling in a bowl, which it will do for the next 48 hours so it can, apparently, capture wild yeast from the air.

As I look outside, I realize just how much I love days like these, when the weather has a firm hand in determining how you’ll spend your time. Rainy days, which are second only to snowy days in my opinion, provide the most beautiful excuses. For example, I can’t go outside for a jog because it’s raining. I can’t go weed at the children’s garden today for the master gardener’s program because the workday has been canceled on account of the weather. So my day has opened up like a book.

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Gabrielle hopped into the car after school the other day and handed me a sheet of paper.

“Our class is putting together a UK basket this year,” she announced, pushing up her glasses and turning to me. “In other words, I need to bring some loot.”

I looked at the sheet and immediately realized it was that time of year again: fall festival season, one of the richest school traditions across the region.

I was first introduced to this concept when Gabrielle, my stepdaughter, entered kindergarten. I expected a little party, possibly a parade and Gabrielle coming home with a few Tootsie Rolls stuffed in her pocket.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

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My stepdaughter Gabrielle and I just spent the last week in Kelowna, British Columbia, to celebrate my little brother Matthew’s wedding. In the time we were there, I was reminded of just how much work planning that Big Day is. Every morning, we’d sit around the kitchen table and the questions would start. Would it rain? Did they need to rent a tent in case it did? Why hadn’t they heard from the caterers? Should they stop at the music store to make sure they knew what they needed for the DJ? Would it rain?

But one morning, in the midst of the flurry, Gabrielle and I escaped in our runners to head out for a walk. Shortly after we hit the road, Gabrielle pointed out what she termed “a goat path,” a narrow trail that carved out of the side of the hill between a few houses. Eager to get off the boring pavement, we headed up and soon the path widened into a trail that climbed upwards.

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After a night sleeping in grandma’s bed, her alarm clock ticking sharply, the best part of the sleepover was the pancakes. She would pull over one of the chairs from her kitchen table and that would be my perch to reach the counter.

She’d add the flour and eggs, baking soda and milk and then the magic ingredient: a little Sprite “to make them extra fluffy,” she said.

Butter was somewhat of a religion in my grandmother’s house, browning it next to God. So when it came time to fry up the pancakes, trust me when I say there was no shortage of it. When her orange pan was sizzling, she would drop the batter in, the chair by now moved to beside the stove so I could watch it fry.

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It’s Tuesday morning so I’ve just spent the last few minutes going around the house watering the plants. It’s something I do every week at this time, and it’s a little ritual that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly started to relish.

In our house, Sir Peter wins the low-maintenance prize for plants, in large part because he gets almost no attention at all. For the past six or seven years, Sir Peter, a tropical croton, has lived in my stepdaughter Gabrielle’s bedroom in a red pot whose drainage hole has been blocked since purchase. Since she has never had a pet at our house — except for one year when we came home with the hamsters Scamper and Rascal, an ill-conceived plan from the get-go — Sir Peter is her companion, whom she, at once, loves deeply and blithely ignores.

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My husband sat down in the car the other day after getting out of a coffee shop in South Dakota and shook his head.

“What is it,” I asked, noting he was holding onto the steering wheel particularly hard.

“The girl just asked me if I wanted my coffee hot,” he said. “I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

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There were many ways my dad showed he loved my little brother Matthew and I, but never was it so plain a display, I realize now that I’m older, as when he would cook us a meal. Whenever Matthew and I would go to his house, he would jump up off the couch and head to the kitchen, leaving us to watch football in the living room.

“What can I get you?” he’d say, this psychologist sounding immediately like a short-order cook.

Sometimes we’d ask for pizza. Sometimes just sandwiches. But often it was hamburgers, the most delicious hamburgers in the world.

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For the past year, I have been running. Around the subdivision. At the gym. On the treadmill. With my stepdaughter. With my friends. In little, sterile gyms if I’m at a hotel. On Wellington Crescent if I’m at my mom’s house. Up Mount Royal if I’m in Montreal. But mostly just on my street. Almost every day, I lace up my runners, grab a water bottle and go.

For a year, I’ve been telling myself and others I’m training for a half-marathon. But so far, I haven’t even registered for one. Things have come up. We were busy that weekend. Or it was too hot that day.

But finally last week, as I raced on the treadmill and sweat poured out of me and I forced myself to go faster and made my friend beside me go faster with me, I asked myself why I hadn’t made it happen yet. If my goal was really to run a half-marathon, why hadn’t I?

It was then that I realized why I was really running — or, more specifically, what I was running from.

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This morning, I am getting my stepdaughter Gabrielle ready for Camp Bonclarken in North Carolina, where she will spend the next week with two of her good girlfriends. Signing her up and driving her down has been entirely my idea and, as her mother and dad look warily on, I am hoping against hope that I don’t screw this up. The paperwork alone has been somewhat overwhelming, and the poor receptionist at her doctor’s office has had just about enough of me as I ask her to fill out pink and green forms that assure the camp that Gabrielle is a nice, normal kid.

This drive to send her to camp is fueled by listening to Emma and Elle Gilleland teach Gabrielle the camp songs they’d learned at Bonclarken the summer before. Looking like a cat following a laser beam, Gabrielle watched them with rapt attention as they not only sang but accompanied nearly each verse with adorable hand gestures and jumps. She was instantly eager to know the songs as well and soon was singing right along with them.

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For the past several weeks, my girlfriends and I have been exchanging group texts, the gist of which are: “What page are you on,” “Did you get to the part in the elevator,” and “I’ll never look at an ice cube the same way.”

So in answer to your question, yes, we are reading the blockbuster of the year, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” known in particular for its ability to raise an eyebrow.

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