As I've mentioned before, my maternal grandparents kept a huge garden when I was a child. There was always at least one 100-foot row for tomatoes. The red fruits lived in tomato cages made of wire fencing that loomed above my four-year-old self. Each cage was at least five feet tall and as big around as two or three of me. From late June until frost, those cages produced hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes. Big Boys, Beefsteak, Yellow Pear, Cherry, Plum, what-have-you - and all of them by the bushel.

This meant that every summer was spent canning all the tomatoes, not one of which would be allowed to go to waste. The few bushels that weren't canned were made into juice, ketchup, or soup base. The tiny yellow pears were cooked down into preserves. By fall, the shelves of the screen porch and the smokehouses were lined with canned food, which my grandma and greatgrandma (whom I called MoMo) cooked with all winter. The canned tomatoes were a staple at winter evening meals, served straight-up with salt and pepper, refrigerated on the unheated porch.

I refused to eat them. My reluctance drove that houseful of Depression survivors absolutely batshit; as far as they were concerned, you ate what was in front of you and were happy to get it. Plus, they pointed out, I ate tomatoes in every other form. Why not canned?

The reason was that I was firmly convinced that those red orbs on the shelves were monkey hearts. My childhood books contained many monkeys of all shapes and sizes, although I don't recall any of them losing their hearts, except maybe to monkey love. There were certainly no wild monkeys in central Arkansas. Be that as it may, I would go out to the shelves on my grandma-ordained mission to retrieve jars of food for dinner and the rows of monkey hearts would glow softly in the twilight.

Finally, one freezing winter night, she lost her patience and made me eat a bite of canned tomato. It's the only time I can ever remember her doing such a thing. I was so shocked at her temper that I actually ate the proferred bit, and to her immense satisfaction I was immediately converted. From then on, I ate them whenever they were on the table and begged for extra jars to take home.