Mr. Miller’s tomato plant continues to draw your attention because of its persistence. Chameleon green skins ripening through oranges to reds like late skies. Fruit clusters. Transparent nets cast over stem branchings make you think tiny spiders claim what matures as their own. Tireless work ethics, those arachnids. Spinning and planning night and day. The strength of their webs isn’t much. Not as sticky as some. You wonder when you might see a victim caught there. You know there must be catches from time to time. Spiders must dine. Privately, under a leaf, you suppose.
Another life form you’ve noted is short as an eyelash. White, like a stray cinder floated free from a fire. Hardly more than a wisp of smoke yet there, lounging upon the veins. Not one, but in number. A half dozen, more, to each leaf’s theatrical stage. Before the safe for vegetables pesticide spray. Now, one. Maybe two, when you look.
When you look, like today, staring past the five-fruited clusters in phases of growth, green foliage just unfurling, other blossoms yielding small beginnings no larger than English peas, past interior curled edges of tobacco-brown leaves, you find personalities.
The tomato most ready to harvest is a holdout. She’s stopped growing. Her stem collar—five-pointed and going brittle—won’t release. Her complexion could not go any redder. She’s allowed your hand. You’ve cupped her. Her skin lets droplets of morning dew roll away, moisten your palm. It’s not intentional—this transference of what night’s nature left. Why she doesn’t let go becomes a puzzle. Perhaps growth does continue, on the inside, and she knows it’s too early yet for plucking. Her seeds are maturing. Her meat finding sweetness. You can’t know for certain and release her from turning this way and that. You don’t break her collar.
She’s a runt. Really. Not much larger than a Satsuma plum, and certainly smaller than a tennis ball, but whole, and wholly contrary. Put your Sunset Western Gardening book back on the shelf—you can’t use plant knowledge garnered from people who know for this one. Like the whole vine in all its growth and uninvited occupations by white fly and spider, its insistence on productivity, be patient, and listen when she speaks. You’ll have me, she says. You or the worm or the fly or the spider. I’m yours, absolutely, in time. For the moment, just let me be red. Can you do that? Let me hang, uninterrupted, on this vine?
[after David Huddle, Museum Piece, In Short, Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones, Editors]
This draws me in. The fourth paragraph is extraordinary. This reader began reading a description of a friend’s plant and fell headlong into a rabbit hole where I glimpsed a ripening relationship.
Poignant words about my tomato plant. Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.