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Bushel baskets symbolize the autumn harvest, which may be why I love them. My husband doesn't have a history with bushel baskets, and he seldom (oh, admit it, he NEVER) gets the terminology right, referring to a bushel basket instead as "a bushel." As in "I put the clothes from the dryer into a bushel." It drives me mad!! (Thirty years of this, after all.) But luckily I am usually cognizant of my own few failings (so very few) and I go for the trade-off. Nonetheless, I copy-edit his phrase, in my mind if not aloud.
Where was I? In my mind I was surrounded by bushel baskets full of tomatoes and red peppers. Or I was standing before our basement stack of bushel baskets, the clean ones sometimes selected for overflow laundry duty, the dirt-encrusted ones taken outside as needed to transport leaves or compost. Having a stack of six or eight bushel baskets makes me feel wealthy, ready for any emergency. (Well, not a broken arm; they wouldn't be much help to someone with a broken arm . . .)
When we remember, we take our extras back to the market, because farmers always need bushel baskets for their produce. I don't know who manufactures bushel baskets these days. They're inexpensively made—no fine edges, no sanding of their splintery wood—but strong and useful. Isn't that a goal for all of us? Wouldn't we all like to be strong and useful—and ultimately disposable, bio-degradable? (Except for the wire handles, which correspond somewhat to our own metal fillings, artificial knees and hips, and other man-made additions to our otherwise biodegradable bodies.)
Several years ago we bought a bushel of tomatoes. Together, husband and wife, we carried it from the borrowed car, up the six steps to the front door. Even sharing the load, one of us on each side, it was much too heavy. I pulled a back muscle, and ever since then, our massage therapist refers to it as my "tomato back."
Don't carry things that are too heavy to carry. Instead, here's what you do. Place the heavy bushel basket of tomatoes on the sidewalk. Go down to the basement and bring up one or two of the extra bushel baskets you keep there. Now transfer some of the tomatoes (a double handful at a time, to avoid bruising them) into the empty basket. Carry the tomatoes inside in small batches. Do not lift a full bushel basket of plum tomatoes. Do not lift even one side of such a basket. Avoid tomato back.
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