A Deep River Year
 July 30, 2014   

 I have been watching this momentous change for several days. One or two of the swollen green tomatoes hanging near the garden fence looked like they were starting to blush a bit. I waited. Early this cool morning as I filled the bird feeders, I looked up to see an unmistakable bright red globe peeking out from the heavy green foliage. The first glorious tomato of the year! If there is a reason to grow a garden, this must be it.

 Of course I plant other things, too. I plant lettuce and peas as early as I can, just to be able to enjoy the first Spring produce after a long, cold winter. Then comes the procession of green beans and summer squash, Swiss chard and cucumbers. I just now see purple eggplants the size of golf balls promising something bigger and better in a few weeks. But a ripe tomato is the prize worth all the stiff muscles and sweat it takes to wish them into being from the time those little dry seeds are planted in March and the little seedlings are set under the basement lights.

 A tomato is more than a tomato, of course. Most of us get our share of tomatoes in salsa and spaghetti sauce and enjoy them immensely. My grandmother and mother both spent long hot summer afternoons peeling and chopping tomatoes and peppers and stirring them into immense pots of chili sauce, which were ladled into glass jars and boiled some more before being set aside in long rows on our cellar shelves in preparation for our winter tables. Out in the black soil of our Iowa garden, my father grew Beefsteaks and Big Boys and Rutgers Improved, long and sprawling, and one July afternoon he would wave me out to join him in the waist-high vines. He would bend down and twist a huge red fruit off and hand it to me, then pick one for himself. Together we would bite into those first tomatoes, and the warm juice would run down our chins and soak into our shirts as we shared a most simple and wonderful joy. Heaven will be like that, I think: a summer day, a mouthful of tomato, my father’s smile.

 First Tomato

 There are crickets chirping
 In the long afternoon,
 and the first katydids rehearsing
 their summer song.
 It is the incidental music,
 the score of these tender days,
 when a tomato waits
 for an old memory to ripen.
 It is there in the odor of earth,
 In the bright, musky scent of tomato leaves,
 when the fading sepia image of a tall man,
 sunburned, strong, T-shirted,
 reaches through the years
 for one red fruit.
 He bites into it, grins, looks up at me
 these decades later
 and hundreds of miles away
 from that sunny Iowa field
 where once I learned joy.
“There,” he says,
 somewhere close,
 "It’s for you.”

--Timothy Haut, July 30. 2014