Person on the Page

I’m taking a class on food writing. This is my first attempt at a writing assignment.

I used to grow bushels of tomatoes every summer.  Early Girls, Better Boys, red cherries and yellow plums, sometimes Romas. Once I grew San Marzanos.  Every year my plants were healthy, their leaves the warm tone of summer grass and aromatic when touched. The fruits plumped and reddened in late July, half concealed by the plants’ foliage. I let them ripen fully before I picked them.

I would call those years when I grew tomatoes barren, but that would sound ironic given the success of my gardening efforts and the unwieldy yearly yields. They were the years following my divorce, the first time when I was utterly alone. Hard, empty years. Growing tomatoes helped me cope.  Tomatoes and other vegetables: varieties of cucumbers, Asian eggplants, intrepid zucchinis, wonderful sticky, tart tomatillos, lush kale. During that period of isolation, I turned inward. I got to know myself.

When I harvested my tomatoes, I made sauce.  I stacked the day’s pick in a big stainless-steel bowl and poured boiling water over them to loosen their skins. A little squeeze of each tomato made the skin split open and slide away from the fruit, leaving me with a slippery ball seemingly ready to burst with juice. I cut each one in quarters and placed them in the tall cook pot I bought just for this purpose. A full pot simmered for hours, reducing to half, then to half again, filling the kitchen with the acidic-sweet aroma of concentrated tomato, the promise of bold, red richness mingled with garlic and basil on the tongue.

I spent nine years alone and raised eight gardens.  Funny how an emptiness can contain such fullness, such abundance.  I learned to like myself during those years.

Now I have remarried and moved to a new house where I can no longer have a vegetable garden.  I start seedlings for houseplants in a makeshift greenhouse in my basement.  I tried growing tomato plants in pots on my deck, but the leaves turned yellow and dry and the tomatoes are small and anemic. They produced a modest armload that I harvested today.  I skinned and quartered them, and even though they were white and somewhat woody inside, I cooked them. While they simmered, I added garlic and a chiffonade of the fresh basil that I’ve been growing in our guest bedroom. After a few hours, I’m pleased to say, I had a respectable marinara.