Have you ever taken a bite out of something and instantly feel that you are transported back in time to an earlier place with the exact taste emanating from your mouth?  I had one of those experiences the other day when Nadine came home from grocery shopping. I have been eating very healthy over the last several months and more specifically since I had the run-in with my heart.  On this heart healthy diet, all salt is cut out along with white breads and desserts.

Just a side note.  I love desserts.  I mean I could live on desserts.  I not only have one sweet tooth, but my whole mouth is filled with teeth that devour sweets and crave more when they are finished with one dessert.  It is an inherited gene from my mother who has to have a sweet at the end of each meal as well as having sweets between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner.  On this diet, sweets are out, so I have to get my sweet teeth to like the natural sugars in fruits like cherries, strawberries, and blueberries.  Right now the peaches are in season which is an alternative to the above sweets.

Well back to my story.  Nadine brought home some vine ripened tomatoes which looked good so I took one and bit into it.  Most of the tomatoes we’ve bought seem tasteless and never taste like the ones you pick off the vine.  Well I got a big surprise when my teeth cut into the skin of the tomato.  The tomato was so delicious and instantly took me back to my roots when I was 2-3.

I grew up in a small home for the first 3-4 years of my life and then moved into the one my father built by hand.  Every summer we would grow a huge garden about 25’X25′ and would plant corn, green beans, squash, water melon, peas, and tomatoes.  When they were ripe, my mother and father would pick them and give my sister and I one to eat out on the back step.  We would get a salt shaker and begin to bite into that juicy tomato.  The taste permeated every crevice of my mouth with delicious emissions of flavor.  The juice would run down the sides of our mouths.

On this particular day when I tasted the tomato that Nadine brought home, I was instantly transported back to that back step where I would finish off a whole tomato.  The simple pleasure of eating a tomato as a very young boy still stayed with me as I experienced the event over again over 60 years later.

On this journey we will be triggered with sights, sounds, and tastes that take us back to the good old days when we were sitting on the back step eating a ripe tomato.  Its in those experiences that we learn to enjoy life in it’s most simplest form.