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Tomatoes, again
A strange, sad, beautiful summer
I’m trying tomatoes again. It’s silly, really. Why do I persist? It costs hundreds of dollars, first of all. I kid you not. I went to the nursery several times, and Home Depot, and various other places, to price the galvanized metal feed troughs they have there for container gardening. The black plastic pots of last year worked poorly. The black fabric bags the year before were even worse, and ugly to boot.
I know it’s silly. I’m on a budget and don’t need to be spending hundreds of dollars to play farmer and grow mediocre or worse tomatoes when I can buy them in volume, sweet and delicious, splitting open, cracking with sugar, at the farmer’s market for pennies on the dollar (whatever that means).
But, my dear neighbor Claudia has reserved some of her “starts” for me. She’s my dear farmer-neighbor that I love. Just a few minutes in her presence, with the almost painfully compassionate gaze from her beautiful turquoise eyes, calms me, restores me to some place I rarely find or can attain. It’s true. It’s a big claim, and true.
So when I accept the present of her baby tomatoes and Genovese basil, I’m not actually committing to farming, or to growing prize-winning vegetables, or anything of the sort. What I’m really doing is trying to capture a piece of Claudia, or what Claudia has, or…
