Tomato Season
On abundance.
When I was in my teens and early twenties, I worked at a flower shop in the evening after school and daily into the summer. Throughout the years, I did a number of jobs that ranged in ease and level of disgustingness, from “most-least” (deliveries, office paperwork) to “least-most” (reorganizing the barn full of old vases, holiday decor, and rats and snakes; disposing of composting flowers, yard work of any kind).
I wasn’t particularly good at this job, though I had it for a long time. Out on deliveries, we had to use books of road atlases to get around, and I often got lost for, like, an hour at a time. I once left the van in neutral, and it began to roll toward a pond while I was in the back. I nearly killed myself with the ride-on lawnmower. But one of the things I was often tasked with was the care and maintenance of the owner Bob’s personal garden.
Bob was older and not particularly mobile—he got around the property on a golf cart—so he sometimes asked me to tend to the plants. I don’t remember everything he grew, but I remember the tomatoes, which were as big as softballs and garnet red.
One late-summer afternoon was hot as hell, and I was out there in the garden. Maybe I felt like I was owed it (I made like eight bucks an hour), or I was just hungry at the time, but I decided to help myself to some of Bob’s tomatoes. I ate them out of my hands like they were apples. The ones I didn’t eat, I delivered to Bob’s back door in a cardboard box.
Not long after, I noticed my hands and arms and bare legs were all stained yellow. I thought it must’ve been from some chemical that Bob used on the tomatoes, which I had then ingested right there in the field. I was fifteen or sixteen and had not yet really encountered pollen, I guess, or I was just more prone, then, to imagining certain disaster. I thought I would be sick, that I would go to the hospital and they would make me throw up everything.
I also don’t remember how I brought it up with Bob, though I know I felt sheepish about the whole thing. I think I told him I was worried about whatever I was covered in—should I wash it off? I do remember him laughing. I’m not sure he already knew, but he told me I could take as many tomatoes as I wanted. He couldn’t eat them all, and it was better to enjoy them than let them go to waste.
Anyways, this year, we haven’t been the best garden stewards—a bit preoccupied keeping something else alive over here. But there are still tomatoes, more than we know what to do with, and I’ll still eat a couple ripe ones right off the vine as I’m picking them, when they’re best.