Illustration by Kathy Hamrick, a freelance artist based in Eufaula, Alabama.
By Kat Privett
There is perhaps nothing more indicative of summer than the smell of a tomato plant. While that earthy, grassy scent has yet to be successfully bottled (although efforts have been made), it’s still one that I long to smell against my skin in summer. Even as I strive to keep my “Southern Grandma” card each year, fighting the viruses and horn worms in the blistering heat, a true tomato harvest continues to evade my tiny farm. It is as if “they” know how much I love them, and for that, I am shunned.
But I couldn’t feign disinterest if I tried.
Regardless of that adoration, I seed fewer and fewer tomatoes each year, focusing instead on the hearty and sturdy crops that love me back. Last summer, I planted one lone cherry tomato plant — haphazardly — against the fence line of the property. And there it remained, forgotten for most of the season as the sun raged and the weeds entangled my walkways.
The arrival of Summer Solstice meant long hours of canning and chopping, gathering and pickling, that segue between spring and its autumnal nemesis of rest and decay. I’ve often lost purpose there in that space, my feet aching against the kitchen floor. Somewhere between the humidity and heat, the manna of green leaks through the cracks of a day, and all that’s left is the promise of a later reward. Sometimes, that’s just not enough.
I’ve often wondered, wrestling with vetch on my knees in the dirt, if it even could be.
Still, I beat on, spade in hand. Last summer was particularly wicked, heralding in twice its pesky companions of aphids, Japanese beetles, and copperheads. The lot of them enjoyed a late summer drought that dwindled the well and suffered the saplings planted the previous fall. And I was moving through a personal loss, a life change that threatened to knock the moors out from under all that was good and familiar and true. I don’t remember choosing the anesthesia of physical labor (although one rarely does recall such procedures), but its effects had begun to taper off with every snap of a bean. And then one random afternoon, they wore off all at once. In the thick of dog days, standing against a tower of okra waving its daily bounty in taunt to my exhaustion, I just stopped everything. Everything.
Nothing made sense anymore: not the sting of sweat in my eyes, the salt against my tongue, or the way the bees darted between my hands as I cut and moved through it all. I had asked for all this, I knew. I had brought it all forth, begged it to flourish, and tended each moment that had preceded the roar of growth that surrounded me now. Here it all stood, reaching for the sun. And here I stood, swallowed whole. It was an incredibly inconvenient moment to wake up, but suddenly, I was quite aware of the way the sun bent into the petals of an okra flower. This was the hard part, that winding, rocky place between seed and food, and somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that it could be beautiful.
My gran had warned against such an outcome decades ago. Her aunties had been wine crafters, although the legality of their efforts in the boondocks of North Alabama remains murky in familial lore. Grandma refused to partake of that spirit but had nonetheless grown its fermentable fruits well into her sixties. I remember her standing in her backyard, weaving grapevines with her worn fingers, crossing and turning them in the late afternoon sun. Don’t miss this part, she cautioned me, or the fruit won’t taste as good.
Still, I had almost always avoided those spaces in between, my eyes closed as I moved through the hard parts, teeth clenched against the roughness of the work. But that day, my hair now white and wet against my scalp, her words resounded in insistent, sharp beats in my memory. I could almost smell my gran as I halted in the okra patch, that incomprehensible alchemy of soil and baby powder and rose. Don’t miss it, she whispered from yesterday, staking her life against mine in a garden she would never see.
And so, I let it take me.
That summer was a beast, and I had white-knuckled and ground through the grit of it with fervor. I just had to get past it, I remember saying to myself as I nursed the blisters and waited for dark. But when I finally just let go, the hum of the woods beyond the fence waxed and waned, no longer dulled by my spade. A euphony of cicadas and squirrels, wrens and toads, threaded along what had been numb, stinging the places I had buried with every stitch. It all washed over me at once, no longer censored by wooden fences and the protective brim of my hat. This was the hard part, the worst part, and I had sunk my anchor into the distant shore of a better time. It was a reckless squander of living, and one I could no longer afford. There are only so many summers to break upon, after all.
And this one had made its case.
I would love to say that my reward that fall was prolific, but it was only enough to sustain our table until December (although those were the sweetest pumpkins I’ve ever tasted). I will say that I remembered a wayward tomato plant one morning as I wandered along the property line and found it in full swing against a fence. Her arms had wound through rusted wire and rested their leaves against the honeysuckle beyond it. No tomato had emerged, not quite yet, but the flowers threatened something sweet.
I breathed in that musky scent of growing and loosened my grip on tomorrow. The path between hope and harvest collapsed its edges and, for all its tedious sprawl, offered a bench to rest. There was magic here, the unassuming kind that fades into the glare of midday and winks behind the sharpness of briars. I didn’t miss it, I whispered, as the tressage of time wove itself over my head.
And somewhere in the past, my grandma’s fingers finally found their fruit.
* Tressage is the practice of braiding the tips of grapevines, which are then tucked and woven back into the canopy rather than being cut. It allows for both critical air flow and rigorous fruit production for the vines.
