Miss Gardner Harvests Tomatoes

Unrelenting heat melts every daily ambition from Miss Bergie Gardner’s brain.

Sometimes, warm morning air only melts her patio door closed until she plants her foot, twists with her hips, pries the door open. Today, the morning air reaches through to her brain, too.

“Groceries? Why? It’s so hot,” she grunts to herself.

Mail? “But it’s hot.”

Sweep the bedroom? “Too hot.”

Breakfast? “Not unless there’s cold, fresh milk left in the fridge. There isn’t. Which requires groceries again. Why? It’s…”

One thing she can do, though.

Sunlight fills the kitchen. The tomato patch is outside.

Where it’s even hotter. Miss Gardner simply will not look for the tomatoes if they are too thickly grown in the patch under the empty sky. More than ten minutes outside is not worth the late summer sun, slowing her hands and drying her tongue so she cannot enjoy a meal for the rest of the day.

But the tomatoes will fall into the soil and split open and waste if she doesn’t go out. Waste is never waste, though, she thinks. Waste is a new plant. Then, more food for the soil. Or food for a wren instead of the Gardner kitchen.

She could bring the tomatoes inside, quickly, just enough. The rest is no waste, then.

So she is back, prying open the door, turning quickly past the corner to the patch on the side of her house. A hat covers her face and the top shoulder seams of her pajamas. She balances a big plastic bowl in one arm, kitchen shears in her hand, leaving the other hand open for tomatoes.

The trellises in the patch are full of green-yellow vines. No wind moves through the garden. The air is not cool, but as cool as it will be ahead of the long day. Miss Gardner’s melting is worse outside. She cannot stay too long to pick the tomatoes and go back.

Even the tomatoes are on their way out.

Earlier in the season, the whole tomato patch was green. Green vines, rough green leaves, closed green buds where a flower might grow.

Now, almost everything is warm in Miss Gardner’s eyes. Painted with a hazy brush. Red or yellow or brown, or heading that way soon. Full. Fruitful. Yellow like the sun and melting. The sky is a bright, lightest-watercolor empty blue. Vines are either heavy or brittle. Nothing between the sun and the patch.

She can see deeper into the patch, into the hidden tomatoes shaded by their own vines, but she cannot stoop or stretch tall to reach them.

Already, sweat starts to gather behind her ears. The sunflowers along the wall are taller than she is and still cannot shade the garden.

There are plenty of tomatoes, more than she can carry, wet from a sprinkler line that brings water, that will not forget to go out. It won’t fret about the heat. The line doesn’t melt or twist itself into a knot. Vines can keep crawling up the trellis and never get to the sky without worrying. A few tomatoes fall and rot in the soil, sure, but they don’t suffer from lack of encouragement. The same thing, different every day just a little but swallowed up by its own dirt dozens of times in dozens of mornings more or less like this one. What from the heat melts Miss Gardner today in a way it has not every day ago?

She does not walk as fast as she used to. The tomatoes are happy to wait. She takes the shears from the bowl into her fingers, setting the bowl down with the same feeling of peeling glue, on the brick beside the patch. She starts to cut vines. The shears press heavy on her finger bones.

Dry leaves shake as Miss Gardner stretches her arm past them. She will carry them into the house along with a bowl full of tomatoes. On her shoes. They rub against her slippery shirt. In her sweaty hair. In her cereal, if she has some later without milk. She can probably avoid most of the leaves collecting on her if she is more careful, slower. Colder.

The first big planter in the patch has the big tomatoes. The vines are thick here and thin there. Miss Gardner has to look deep through, above, below, even when her legs don’t follow her.

One vine strains down under a red-orange heirloom that looks like a pumpkin. She plucks it.

She grabs another big red tomato, big as her palm. Once she has a hold of it, she pulls it out towards her until it snaps from its flower. This is a good sign. “Not worth the shears,” she thinks. If she can press on the skin without the tomato falling apart, it is also still good. Good tomatoes are soft between tough, wooden green and mushy red-brown.

These red tomatoes are wonderful when sliced and salted, with butter on fresh, soft bread that’s just a little crusty around the edges, for breakfast. They are also good in thick half slices, a spoonful of cottage cheese, crudité topped with flakes of cooked salmon and fresh dill, for lunch.

She puts the tomato in a bowl and reaches back in to pinch another tomato.

The sun has already painted over some of the tomatoes. Hidden and bright red, or hidden and bright red and burst on the vine, or hidden and dull red and dried out in the sun. Not hidden for long.

She can pick at a few of these to see if they are not too burst. Dirt stains the pads of Miss Gardner’s fingers, packs into the beds of her fingernails. She wipes oil from the bridge of her glasses and replaces them around her ears.

There is not much time left, she thinks.

The second planter is where the small cherry tomatoes grow. These vines curl out to a pot, each vine full of a dozen cherries small as Miss Gardner’s fingernails. Half of the cherries are reddish enough to pick. She can chop the entire row of them from their thin vine. On a cooler morning, she would keep the vine and snap them one by one into her bowl. The rest of the green cherries have to wait a few more mornings on the kitchen counter until they get color.

She shoos aside a bee to another flower. She doesn’t see it behind the plants, so maybe instead it goes on the pot of basil near the tomatoes.

When the small tomatoes are ruddy red from the sun, they are juicy as ripe peaches but stain worse than peaches. They are good for bursting into a pan of pasta. Or bubbling under a sunny egg that is just almost white instead of clear, then salted and garliced.

Her ribs are sore from reaching to the bottom of the planter for tomatoes that droop almost out and onto the ground beneath. Just for a minute, she slumps against the leaning planter. Her fingers follow the curve of her jaw when she rests her head. She lifts one foot then the other, pushing off the planter with her back to stand up again.

Just like before, some tomatoes are too full of sunshine for too long. They are dark dirt red, cooked in the sun to bursting by themselves. When they fall, their seeds are already back into the ground. Miss Gardner lets a caterpillar scoot onto her finger and lowers that finger most of the way to the red dirt where the caterpillar can have its own breakfast. Better that it goes after the tomatoes she will not reach any way, she thinks. A short distraction but already too long. She feels the sweat on her hands.

The bowl is almost too heavy for her hands. Even the tomatoes that are green-almost-yellow can ripen red on the kitchen counter. They can wait for a sandwich with bacon, or salsa. Only the green tomatoes are left on the vine.

Miss Gardner steps inside. She could see the tomatoes clearly at first. Now they are all warm hazy watercolors.

The bowl rattles when it slides onto the kitchen counter. Tomatoes spill out onto a towel, leaving behind loose leaves. The old lady will go back to them later to sort which of these tomatoes are good enough to keep and wash for breakfast. Or stay on the counter. The rest can go in the trash. In the first summer morning, she would worry more about keeping the tomatoes she could keep. Now, there are already so many.

A chair finds her. Her feet are too liquid to move at the moment. She breathes. Cold air fills the house.