flickr user jacki-deeWhat we’ve been missing.I’m not one to spend much time talking about the weather. For one thing, in this town it gets real depressing real fast and also, what is the point? (On a side note, it must be said that people who complain about the Seattle heat for those four days every summer are among the worst kind of people anywhere.) This summer (if you can call it that), any weather-related frustration I’ve been feeling has been channeled at one very easy target: the lack of tomatoes. Since the middle of July every week I’ve been hoping, against all odds, for the arrival of tomatoes in our CSA box from Local Roots. A few weeks ago, I started breaking down, buying a little box of cherry tomatoes from Billy’s, getting down on my hands and knees for a few pounds of “seconds” (slightly bruised, slightly ugly, but no less delicious tomatoes) from the bins under the table. Finally, two weeks ago, the tomatoes arrived. But they arrived with a somewhat foreboding note hinting at the direness of this year’s tomato situation. “In an effort to be fair,” read the Local Roots newsletter, “we will be giving between one and three tomatoes per box. Portioning out the week’s tomato harvest for the CSA is always tough for those of us who care about fairness, but I think it will all even out in the end, as long as you all just take the box off the top of the stack and accept the luck of the draw (no hunting around).”Randomly rationing tomatoes and warning desperate vegetable lovers not to root around in other people’s boxes surely could not be a sign of a plentiful tomato harvest. We took home our lone tomato (alas, we were not one of the lucky ones) and waited for the next round.Last week’s newsletter promised us “about one pound” of tomatoes, which turned out to be just one tomato–one big, beautiful, honking, deep purplish red fruit–but just one all the same. We polished it off in a matter of minutes, standing at our butcher block, taking turns slicing thick rounds off the bottom, dusting them with just a bit of salt, then letting the other eat them straight off the knife. “Let’s face it,” I said, juice dribbling down my chin, “this is what summer is really about.” And with that, our tomato, and the whole season, was done.