I'm standing in my kitchen, happily chopping a bumper crop of red, ripe, juicy tomatoes just picked from my garden and still warm from the sun.

The little white dog sits at my feet, waiting for my sloppy knife work to propel chunks of food her way, lunging for each tidbit as it hits the floor and turning her furry face a hilarious shade of pink.

On the counter is more bounty from the earth: a bowl of small, beautifully striated purple-and-white Japanese eggplants; a pyramid of crisp green and red peppers; a basket full of fresh basil, parsley and chives; a pile of rhubarb just trimmed of its leaves.

Soon the produce will be transformed into quarts of zingy tomato sauce and a gallon of spicy-hot gazpacho, pints of fragrant pesto, sweet-and-tart pies and cobbler.

The aromas are to live for, and I keep tasting and eating as I go, finally satisfying the cravings that began months earlier when I stuck the tiny plants into the ground and stood over them with my typical impatience, willing them to grow, Grow, GROW. The finished dishes are a testament to Mother Nature: fresh ingredients make the cook.

Meanwhile, from upstairs, come the sounds of our daughter getting ready to leave for her junior year of college. Her footsteps travel up and down, back and forth, as she roots through drawers and closets, finding, assembling, packing. The washing machine sloshes, the clothes dryer spins, the suitcase drags across the carpet, as I chop away.

That's when it hits me. This must be why God made tomatoes ripen in late August, so that mothers with gardens can throw themselves into such a cooking frenzy that they hardly notice their kids heading out the door for another term. Or, when they do notice, their hands are so sticky with juice that they can't use them for clutching, and any red eyes are attributable to the onions.

Is it just a coincidence that my garden and my kid's college career are the same age?

Two summers ago, after a lifetime of not thinking about growing my own food, I decided to give it a go. The newly minted high-school graduate joked that I was replacing her with vegetables so I'd have something to take care of in her absence. I wasn't conscious of such a motive -- and planning that far ahead is not like me, anyway -- but she may have been onto something.

Getting her off to her freshman year was a chaotic, stressful process involving a borrowed SUV crammed to bursting. Moving her into the dorm and leaving a few hours later was part trauma and part relief. Of course we would miss her, but we wouldn't miss the tension of the previous few weeks, and neither would she. (When her dad and I read a recent article about parents of freshmen hanging around overnight and even going to the first day of classes with their kids, we had exactly the same thought: These people are nuts.)

Arriving back home from that first moving trip, we were greeted by a riot of gorgeous tomatoes calling out to be relished. Which we did. Our hearts were a tad achy, but our taste buds were ecstatic.

Last year, blight killed off just about everybody's tomatoes, but for some reason we still had plenty of sweet, cherry-sized Sun Golds to pop into our mouths for delicious explosions of flavor. And the basil flourished as if to make up for the shriveled beefsteaks.

Thanks in part to summer storage of our daughter's first-year furnishings, the family sedan afforded plenty of room for the college haul. Packing and moving were more efficient and the parting was more practiced. This was no longer the unknown. And there was a lot of pesto to be made at home.

This year, the whole garden is in profusion. Our rising third-year student, barely back from working all summer in New England, turned the laundry around in record time. She and I even had time to take in the Julia Roberts chick flick, "Eat, Pray, Love." Not having read the book, we left thinking the same thing about the narcissistic protagonist who kept complaining about a life that seemed pretty darned great: One, Big, Whine.

On the day of departure, our daughter put a duffle and a suitcase in the trunk of my old car, fastened her bike on the rack and drove down the driveway, leaving her parents and the little pink-faced dog to recede in her rear-view mirror, waving and barking.

This, I told myself, is how it should be as they grow up and into themselves (except maybe for the part where they take your car). They go away at first with trepidation, return long enough to grow restless, take off again for a job or adventure or another term, gathering confidence and independence as they go, and so on, back and forth, until you realize that they'll probably never live at home again (boomerang kids notwithstanding).

The air grew very still. My husband and I looked at each other for a few seconds with the mixed expression that comes now as second nature -- happy that she's happy, sad that she's gone, kind of lost (what to do with ourselves?), kind of excited about the answer to that question (whatever we want!).

"Good thing we like each other," he said as we went back into the house.

We cooked up some spaghetti, ladled on bubbling sauce from the big pot on the stove, sprinkled it with Parmesan cheese and closed our eyes as the first forkfuls permeated our senses.

Heaven.

Some hard things do get easier with repetition. And some good things get even better.

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