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
