Tomatoes and Things
Things just aren’t like they used to be. Take tomatoes. It’s a truth universally acknowledged: Nothing tastes like a sun-ripened tomato, still warm from the garden. Our garden—where my mother planted 400 tomato plants each spring (with the aid of Daddy’s tobacco setter, after those little money-makers had been set in the freshly harrowed fields)—yielded bushels of the crimson fruit, just bursting to be pressed into my mother’s priceless, secret recipe catsup. It was a harvest shaken down and running over, enough for the string-bean, barefoot child to claim as many as she could eat. If there’d been a contest, I would‘ve been the juice-stained hands-down winner. Summer mornings, just before the relentless sun drives you into cooler shadows by the woods, the trickling stony creek, I race to the verdant field where Mom’s dark head is barely visible over the sapling corn, already her knees in dirt, gathering the promising harvest into the old split bushel basket (“I love you a bushel and a peck—“). Her sardonic smile signals she knows my motives: “Wipe them off before you put them in your mouth,” she cautions. Tardily, I oblige, polishing the alluring prize on yesterday’s wrinkled denim. Can’t wait, have waited so long, survived (barely) the winter dearth, the present reality too tempting to resist. Again, I curse (silently, because Mom) the poor memory that forgets to tuck a shaker of salt in my shorts’ pocket to enhance the feast before I even get it to the kitchen. Juice waters my chin, burns the vindictive chigger bites as it runs down my lightly suntanned arm. Seeds plant themselves impotently on my cotton shirt. Two, three bites—it’s gone. Swallowing, reach for another. There is no bottom to the bounty, the one thing there’s plenty of. Take all you want, there’s more. Nothing like it, this side of paradise.
Except now, even summer tomatoes don’t taste like they used to. No one really likes winter tomatoes. Hot-house raised. We curl our lip, tolerate them in the cold, barren months, just because sometimes one simply cannot do without a tomato. But mostly, like so many things, we go without, waiting for July. Demeter longing for Persephone. We abide, knowing, praying, the cycle’s never late. Except now, the long anticipation over, we eagerly seize the deceptive red orbs at the farmers’ markets, the tantalizing taste of BLTs tingling on our tongues. The knife slices the reddened skin, the juice and seeds, firm flesh impersonating their forebears, but even crisp (burn it!) bacon, Bibb lettuce, Duke’s mayonnaise cannot mask the disappointment that belies the homegrown come-on from the vendors. Cut into another, just in case, though these aren’t free any more: $2.50 for one, $5.50 for a greedy two. Where did we go wrong? Like so many things.
They gave us Eden and we shit where we ate. Paved paradise and all that. Shit on that, too (coughcough sanfranciscocough—even cats cover their scat). The animal kingdom—what’s left of it that isn’t mutilated on the highways—shies shamefully from us, seeking a shrinking, stolen sanctuary, its anxious glance sharpened by centuries of death-learned wisdom. We are not friends, regardless of our love to domesticate, turn everything into house-broken, well-trained toys. We are barely-recognizably related, Darwin be damned. And when the worm turns, if it ever does, it will not be so much to exact revenge but to broadcast, correct for the record that glaring irony of misnomers: wild, feral, bestial. “We’re not animals,” we boast, pompous in our misguided, misplaced priorities. And who can disagree? Not Walt, certainly not Wendell, not even Marlin Perkins, spokesman for our version of the Wild Kingdom (every Sunday night). God, I wish we were. That feeling when you really do wish you had been adopted…
I wolf down another market tomato, forgetting too late it isn’t like it used to be. Reminded quickly enough, I grope for salt, debate the age-old question: to swallow or not to swallow? When will I learn? We? When will it become second nature to be like nature, to eschew the damning domination of the higher caste? When will we evolve into our better selves, return to that from whence we came and start again from scratch, make amends for our misspent millennial youth—logic, thumbs, amenities in abeyance. Like things used to be but never really was.
–Rebecca Luttrell Briley, August 2, 2023
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