A Tomato Worth 63 Cents?

Sooner or later, someone is going to ask, so as a preemptive strike, here is the answer.  My icon is a tomato with a 63-cent price tag because of a family story about my mother and grandmother that took place when I was growing up.  My grandmother, known as Mammaw to all us kids, was born in 1910, and brought up on a different work ethic than most people in my generation.  She believed you worked, period.  That was it.  No ifs, ands, buts, maybes, or excuses.  She was quite old, and still planting a garden every year, still tilling it with a roto-tiller, still chopping wood for the fire, and washing clothes in an old-timey washing machine.  My mother, her middle child, would try to get Mammaw to take it easy, to not work so hard.  Mom was afraid she would have some kind of collapse.  Every year, Mom would ask Mammaw to NOT plant a garden THIS year.  But Mammaw kept working.  Kept planting gardens. 

One day, Mom stopped by the store on her way home from work, just to pick up a single tomato.  She was outraged at what was then a high price for one tomato- sixty-three cents.  She came to Mammaw's house fussing about inflation, and told Mammaw, "I'll never fuss at you again for having a garden!" 

The story became a family joke, and made its way frequently into the cartoons I used to draw about all the inside jokes that only my family would ever understand.  Often my mother could be seen in those cartoons, holding (among other representations of other family jokes that were on her) a tomato with a 63-cent price tag.

Mammaw is long gone now, and my Mom recently celebrated her own 75th birthday.  We had a huge celebration for her, and we had 4 cakes made.  We had the cakes made with those photos that you can have the bakers put on top of the cakes.  I used the 63-cent tomato photo you see as my icon, and three other photos representing family inside jokes, as the photos for the cake decorations. 

And that is where that photo came from.  An old family joke.  I'll probably be sharing more of my old family jokes with my blog friends in the future, so ... stay tuned.  The others will be funnier.  :D