Festival Day!...and a tomato fight.
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Hi!
It's 6AM Eastern time as I send this off to you.
The Grosse Pointes Art Festival day is finally here and I am at this
moment, exhausted, excited, in a hurry scurry loading the car, and
ready to roll.
So for your enjoyment I am sharing an excerpt from a book of (mostly)
true stories that I have been writing for the last decade (or more).
It will give me a quick break from writing, and I hope it will give you
a few laughs, especially if you have siblings.
With no further adieu, here is...
Tomato Fight
by Jan Dale
All rights reserved
The last languid days of summer were a wistful memory and the first
frost had not yet come.
It was time to gather what was left of the tomatoes. I was ten and at
the apex of my annoyance factor regarding George and Kate.
The concept of school was still refreshing to me whereas in their more
finely tuned sense of chronology they knew how much was yet ahead for
them.
Therefore, while they were understandably less enthusiastic about
spending their Sunday afternoon out in the mucky soil picking the last
of the tomatoes before that night's impending frost could claim the
garden, I chose to view it as an adventure.
This, as it happened, was the source of the trouble later that day.
We each had our regular chores to do, but Mother had no system for
choosing which of the children would do such non-routine tasks as
rescuing the tomatoes.
If she had a strategy at all, it was that once she decided a task like
that needed doing, she would scan the premises for signs of human life
. . . kind of like a heat-seeking missile.
Once under the light of Mama's surveillance, there was really no
escape. The trick was to anticipate a child-labor scan before it
commenced.
Phyllis, at 16, was most adept. She caught on as soon as she heard the
slight cough Mother made when Sonny Elliot announced the frost warning
around midday.
She slipped out of the house and down the street to the refuge of her
friend's house under the pretense of returning the Beatles 45 record
she had borrowed.
George and Kate made the mistake of attempting a joint escape.
Separately, at least one of them might have made it into the obscurity
of the greater outdoors. Together, they presented a much larger target
and mother accosted them in mid-flight.
I was so thoroughly engrossed in making a new dress for my Barbie that
I failed to detect the telltale signs. By the time I realized that the
house was far too quiet, it was too late.
Had I known that this was about the vegetable garden and not about some
new clean-up campaign, I would not have fought it.
But I didn't know. So I tried . . . I really did . . . to steal down
the attic stairs. Hard experience, however, had told me that Mother
would be waiting silently for me down there somewhere.
We already knew how Mama wanted us to sort the tomatoes, so she gave us
only a few brief reminders before releasing us to the work that we knew
would take us until almost suppertime to complete.
We were to glean the tomatoes thusly: Red ripe unbruised tomatoes went
into one box. Ripe fruit with less than a quarter of its surface
bruised went into another. Green went into a third and the rest were to
be left on the ground to be tilled under when Dad returned from his
electronics trouble-shooting trip to Flint.
We'd had a bumper crop that year and so the three rows of Big Boys and
the single row of yellows Dad planted had produced more ripe tomatoes
than we were able to pick after school each day.
Thus the ground was littered with tomatoes in various stages of decay.
When we picked up a plump looking tomato we couldn't always tell
whether the underside would be completely rotted or if it might prove
worthy of rescue.
And despite Mother's earlier injunctions, we each had our own schematic
for how to sort them. George made his decisions quickly and filled a
whole box before Kate had meticulously pondered scarcely a dozen
tomatoes.
I tried to find a balance between speed and accuracy but I must have
failed miserably because George kept telling me to pick up the pace and
Kate kept re-sorting the ones I contributed to the boxes.
I sang as I worked, oblivious to their growing angst. We all grew less
and less discerning as the sun crept across the sky and slowly made its
way toward the distant horizon.
We'd been at it for two hours when the first tomato plopped harmlessly
at my feet.
"Why don'tcha watch whatcher doin'?" I looked first at the semicircle
of seedy red pulp near my bare muddy toes and then .....
>>>>>>>>>>> To Be Continued >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
...and until then,
Take time for birdsong, or a tomato fight, whichever delights you more.
Jan
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