Better than Rubies

I picked a bag of tomatoes for a friend.

I’m hauling in more tomatoes than I know what to do with. My guts can finally digest vegetables again after being sick for two months, so I’ve been having a tomato a day. Adrienne likes homemade marinara sauce, but even she can have too much. Michael is allergic to tomatoes; the juice breaks him out in a rash. But the tomatoes don’t stop coming. I keep sharing them with neighbors. Jimmy’s boy picks a handful whenever he comes for a visit. I left a sack of tomatoes and a vase of sunflowers on the porch of The Man who Brought Water, for his wife to discover that evening, as a thank-you for letting us use the hose whenever we need in this drought. Next, I brought some to Ms. B who loves on the next block.

You might remember Ms. B. She is the mother of Ezra, the autistic boy who used to live across the street. Ms. B was our stalking neighbor‘s nemesis before she fixated on us– she opened the door to a policeman or a bemused social worker quite a few times, before the bad wiring in their slum house caused a catastrophe. They were homeless for awhile, and then they moved into the house near the market. The market only has those flavorless tomatoes that they pick when they’re still green so they’ll survive the trip across the country. Those are barely edible. So when she mentioned that ripe tomatoes were her favorite, I ran out to the garden.

The sun was pleasantly warm, which meant that the tomatoes were pleasantly warm. Each one felt alive, like a magical touchstone in my hand. I picked several Romas which only taste of a tomato. They are the most prolific tomatoes, and the very best for cooking. I picked A Beefsteak which is sweeter than a Roma. Beefsteaks are best for slicing and putting on a sandwich or between pieces of cheese. I picked a Beefsteak-sized Mister Stripey which is sweet as a pineapple, sweet enough to have for dessert. It would be sacrilege to do anything with a Mister Stripey except eat it right out of the garden like an apple. And I picked one tiny red grape tomato, from a vine that grew out of the compost by accident. I think it came from a rotting salad I found in a food pantry box.

I once read an Eastern European folktale about a witch who lived in a marsh, and enticed men to drown themselves there by plying them with pots of gold and jewels. My sack of tomatoes reminded me of the illustration in that text: a cache of several sizes of impossibly bright ruby. These tomatoes were better than the very best rubies. Rubies can’t be eaten while still warm from the garden on a summer afternoon.

I thought about the story on the way t Ms. B’s house. You’ve surely heard a folktale like it. You could probably tell me how to get a handful of treasure without falling into the witch’s trap.

The way to avoid the witch’s trap was to insist that you couldn’t take any treasure from her pot of gold. You could only take the treasure that she handed you with her own hands, even if that treasure didn’t look so enticing.

I pretended I was the witch of the marsh all the way to Ms. B’s house; when I got there, my bag of rubies was still warm.

“Is your mom here?” I asked Ezra, who is nearly grown now, but still likes to eat dry cereal out of a bowl on the front porch while watching the cars go by. He left his bowl of cereal on the porch as he went to fetch his mother. First out the door came the second-youngest, who was a toddler when I first knew her but who starts fifth grade this year. Finally came Ms. B herself, with the baby. The baby was only born six months ago, an impossibility; Ms. B is a year older than me and had been told she’d never bear children again.

The baby was the very best kind of baby: cheerful, healthy,  heavy as a sandbag, plump as my tomatoes.

There was wispy blond hair on the back of her neck, but a little bald tonsure on the very roundest part of her head. I got to snuggle her with the tonsure against my cheek, while we chatted about what a surprise she’d been. Ms. B’s oldest, who is in her twenties and lives with her, had come along to the hospital to be her birth assistant. The labor certainly wasn’t easy at her age. Now the oldest was saying that if she ever wanted a baby, she’d just adopt. But she loved the baby. Sometimes Ms. B would wake up and find the oldest had fallen asleep rocking the baby, as if she were the baby’s second mother.

“It doesn’t take away the pain of their pappy being gone,” she said, referring to her own father who died before Christmas. “But it’s, well, you know…”

“Kind of a distraction?” I volunteered.

“Yes!” said Ms. B. “Yes. A good distraction from it all. Poor Ezra, though, he’s outnumbered. Now he’s the only boy in the house.”

Next we chatted about Ezra and how well he was doing, all the skills he was learning at school. How well the second oldest was doing, and the chapter books she’d finished over the summer. How well the oldest was doing at her job, and how much better she’d feel after she saw the doctor for her back aches.

“They know how babies come out,” said Ms. B, smiling at the children each in turn. “They don’t know how they get in there yet.”

I laughed.

I went home feeling as if life was good.

Sometime later, I went to water the garden with the neighbor’s hose again. The goldfinch and the cardinal were dining on my sunflower seeds; they darted away, all color and majesty, as if they, too, were really an enchanted treasure.

Jimmy’s boy had been to play in the yard with his friends while I was out. He stores his sand tools in Adrienne’s old sandbox now, so he has something to entertain him whether I’m there to show off the garden or not.

There was a time when I thought I would never, ever, ever get along with Appalachian people. All I wanted was to go home to the Midwest.

There was a time when I’d have drowned myself in any marsh, reaching out to grab those treasures instead of the ones that were being handed to me.

I realized, in spite of all my troubles, I felt perfectly happy.

I think I am home.