Yearning in Colored Photographs

A friend on Facebook jollied about the fact that the seed catalogues are in the mail, coming to be tucked under your pillow by the Garden Fairy's spring-soiled hands. I don't have a corner to plant anything, but looking through the pages of burgeoning vegetables still causes salivation and imagined, longed-for visions of carrots to well inside. Earth changed into food. You go out in the morning cold to breathe warm exhalations over tiny seedlings, just to make sure the early cutworms didn't slash the young tender stems for their own dining. It's fun to grow your own from scratch and easily done, so that for a $4.00 packet of heirloom tomato seeds, you end up with generous bushels of red globes made to be sliced up as summer supper. Sweet corn, sliced tomatoes, bread and butter, iced tea. Done. Get fancy with a peach cobbler for dessert.

But this is January now, sun went down just after five late afternoon, mid this dark, cold standstill of growing. I bought a tomato which was waxen, hard, dangerous as a launched weapon, hoping it will soften up over the next few days on the counter. Reminiscent of the real thing, it will go through the motions of being a tomato and suffice, bringing a small bit of cheer to the next meal.

It will be late July, early August before the fat, juice-laden red bobbles of sun appear at the Farmer's Market. Growers pride themselves on what they produce, and will spin tales of pedigree regarding shape, vigor, and most of all, flavor. Reds, oranges, yellows, striped blends, purple heart-shapes explode from the beds of pickup trucks and family grown and gone station wagons. Men and women groan and gulp draughts of air before hauling their just-picked bounty, all exhausted from being in the fields since three-thirty in the morning. Split wood baskets are loaded with beauties, denim overalls hitch over broad backs, Dad trots over to the vendor for coffee, Mom sets out cukes and early squash in rows of quart containers. Oh tomatoes, exuberant rampant crest of summer, I bow in humble grace.

Settle in for the evening with something in your lap, whether a catalogue or magazine; there is something renewing about reading. Nighttime is for settling in, for quiet inside the walls, for sleep. Sheets are ready, slippers off. Good night, this good night.