We Come In Peace, Bearing Tomatoes

This year we grew tomatoes in our garden, and tomatoes only. I craved nothing more than the sugar-sweet yellow ones, small as grapes, the kind Chris Cadwell grows at Tutti-Frutti farms, and maybe a few dense fleshy heirlooms, and certainly some firm little Romas for salad and sauce, but tomatoes only. I wanted texture and flavor, true pomodoro, no settling for less.

So early in the season, I hunched beneath the protective wire screen that encloses the patch we call our garden and tenderly placed the fledgling plants into the rich black soil, poking a cone of metal around each one for its future support. I watered by hand as often as needed and watched as the plants grew tall and leafy. Soon the verdant foliage extended throughout the garden like a beautiful jungle, and eventually tiny yellow flowers appeared, but they lingered too long, and it seemed to me we were growing a lot of leaf and very little fruit.

“It’s been that way even on the farm,” said Chris, which reassured me. Maybe the summer had been too cool. Or maybe too mild. Chris said his tomatoes did better with a little stress.

So I tended and waited and watched, and suddenly we came into our season. In the old tradition of feast or famine, our plants, now crammed and crowded beneath their wire housing, had all at once erupted into fruit. My gardening task at this point was to crawl around and gather: bending, squatting, and stretching, plucking as many tomatoes as I could, and in the process contorting myself into all sorts of uncomfortable positions, my own special gardening yoga.

Often I left the fruit too long and the little yellow ones burst into juice and seed at my touch, while others grew sun-dried on the vine and many fell to earth where curious lizards scampered up close to them like spectators to a crime. I carried swollen sacks of tomatoes back to the house each day. I blanched and skinned them, then squashed them down and turned them into puree to freeze for future sauce. I popped them into my mouth like candy and sprinkled them into salads and sliced them onto sandwiches and watched them rot in bowls.

Yesterday we decided to make a serious dent by giving them away to neighbors. We met with some refusals, but a couple of friends within walking distance humored us, so Monte and I packed a few bags and began our stroll up the canyon. I was listening to Pavarotti on my i-pod, which lately has seemed  the only appropriate soundtrack to a life set here and now, and although the air was warm, we noticed that the slant of light had softly gone autumnal, and I watched our shadows, side by side, and it occurred to me as we walked along that this is probably what happiness looks like.

We passed a certain ancient oak and remembered a certain little girl measuring its circumference for a science project. A hawk screeched in the distance, and we left a gift of music tied to Jeanne’s gate with a ribbon, then walked past the place where the creek will cross the road in winter, and we came to the house where Emilie, Sameer and Ravi are staying. We had tea with them, and we talked and left tomatoes, then we climbed the hill to Lee and Margaret’s house, and we talked and left tomatoes, and finally, feeling both munificent and unburdened, we ventured back home.