Tomatoes In October

I’m down in Charlottesville, VA visiting my parents for the weekend—my Mom’s 64th birthday and a Monday board meeting for the cancer foundation they started a few years back. It’s 80 degrees, same as Brooklyn. Warm and humid. But it didn’t really strike me just how weird this weather has been until I went on an afternoon walk with my father and saw their garden: several peppers and tomatoes still ripening on each plant. In late October. Red and gold and brown leaves sparkling in the trees along the edge of the back field all the same. It was the most surreal thing I’ve seen in a while.