"The flower that blooms late is the most rare and beautiful of all."
- The Emperor, Mulan
If we named this year, we might call it, "The Year of Our Tomato Adventure." Mark supposes that the tomatoes gently ripening on the upper windowsill above the kitchen sink probably cost around a hundred dollars each.
We started late, for one thing. There were distractions, and so it wasn't until we were well into May that I realized I hadn't put in any Cordell tomato seeds. We scrambled—gathering egg cartons and potting soil, creating nursery space for baby 'maters in sunny windows, remembering to water enough but not too much.
And those little seeds preened and sprouted; they were joyously green, stretching their tiny, tender leaves to that life-giving sunshine.
Soon—well, it was June by then,—they were ready to be transplanted tenderly into little blue pots, pots made of plastic harvested from the ocean and morphed into life-affirming vessels. The tomatoes liked that environment, too, and we cleared off more space—on top of bookshelves, on the daybed-side table in the sunporch (we grandly call that 'guest space in the Florida room'), on the dresser in the dining room's bay window.
And I realized I had Roma tomato seeds, too; we broke out more egg cartons and we started those.
So it was July and we were still moving bambino and toddler tomatoes into ever larger pots.
Then the question was this: how do we safely put them outside? How do we protect them from the deer who graciously wait until those fruits begin to blush, and then chomp them off their woody stems? How to avoid the squirrels or raccoons who delight in taking one bite out of seven or eight otherwise perfect plump tomatoes?
"We are not growing tomatoes to feed the freeloading wildlife," Mark vowed. One day we saw an ad for an enclosed raised bed structure; it had walls about eight feet high with chicken wire stretched tight across them…a barricade against deer and rodents with a taste for tomato.
"It's a lot of money," Mark mulled.
"But it's a long term investment," I countered.
He was willing to be persuaded; he ordered the kit.
It came in two parts, separately; Mark had to wait for both boxes before he could start, on weekends and evenings, to construct the structure we came to call the Pigpen.
And each phase had its own challenges. Mark built the Pigpen, and he moved the tomatoes into giant vats inside its protective walls. Then he realized climbers and flyers could merrily access the now burgeoning tomato plants through the open ceiling. He bought more chicken wire and enclosed.
This, then, was the end of August, the beginning of September. Cold weather rolled in. Frost warnings descended on the land. The tomatoes were big plants now; even the smallest one, the one we called "Little Guy," was exuberantly woody and flaunting little golden stars.
"They're probably fine?" I conjectured in a hopeful tone, because really, what did I know about tomatoes and temps?
Mark, Lowe's #1 preferred customer, went out and bought heavy duty plastic and enclosed the Pigpen. He started calling it 'the Green House.'
One day it poured and the plastic roof sagged under the weight of puddled rain. Mark ran out in the morning, poked holes and drained the load. That night he bought more lumber and made ceiling supports.
It grew colder, and Mark was outside with extension cords and a drill, screw drivers, and some squat black little device. When he came in, he was pleased with the project.
"I put a little heater out there," he said. "And look!" He held up something that looked like a TV remote. "I can control the temperature from inside!"
Those golden stars nestled among fragrant leaves began turning into little hard green tomatoes. The tomatoes basked in their hothouse environment.
The electric company sent me a notice. You're using significantly more power than you used this time last year, they said.
But we were within striking distance of harvesting. It was November now.
And one day Mark went out, and, through the kitchen window, I saw him careening around inside the Pigpen, and its door opened, and a fat, nicely pink tomato came flying out, landing with a splat in the wet green grass.
"Worms!" yelled Mark. "They get ripe enough to eat, and worms find them!"
There were dozens of hard little tomatoes on the vines, tomatoes the discerning worms were reluctant to eat yet. We picked them all and researched how to ripen tomatoes in the house. The method we went with is this: put them in paper bags with bananas. The bananas release some enzyme or chemical that tomatoes need to ripen.
And by gum, it works. As the tomatoes begin to blush, I take them out and put them on the sill above the sink. There are 16 tomatoes there now, and more softly readying in a bag, waiting to take their places.
On Sunday we made tacos and ceremoniously chopped our first homegrown 2022 Cordell tomato. Tonight we will have BLT's, and we'll chop and flash freeze the tomatoes we can't use right now.
And we'll dry seeds for next year's crop, which we WILL plant in a timely way. And we'll figure out what to do about those dreadful little wormy things, too.
But here is my thought: we're teetering, as I write this, on the far ledge of November's rooftop, just about to drop into December's anteroom—and into deep, dark winter. And our tomatoes are ripening.
It's the beginning of what we think of as a frozen, fallow time, but some things are blooming, and some things are ripening; some things are just coming in to their own. It feels a little miraculous—hopeful and unexpected.
What else blooms in December?
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Mark's legal assistant had a Christmas cactus, and she wasn't happy. The plant seemed healthy enough, but it certainly didn't bloom at Christmas. It never bloomed, in fact.
She said something about throwing the plant away, and Mark rescued it and brought it home.
That, I think, was at the end of March. We put the Christmas cactus on top of the bookshelf in the living room window, put it there and pretty much forgot about it, except to water it once a week or so.
Then, lo and behold, toward the end of April, it pushed out some blooms. They weren't huge flowers, but they were definitely blossoms.
Kind of confused, time-wise, that little plant, we thought. Mark took pictures to share with the plant's former mama.
And the blossoms fell off, and the plant nestled into its home in the living room. Once in a while, I pushed a fertilizer stick into its dirt; I watered it and its companions, viny ivy-type greenery grown from a plant Mark received from co-workers 28 years ago. The cohabitants all seemed to get along just fine.
Two weeks ago, I noticed fat buds on the Christmas cactus.
We had to move the bookshelf to make way for the Christmas tree (put up earlier this year than we have ever put up a tree before). The shelf now nestles into the bay window in the family room, peeking out over the top of the blue loveseat. We moved the plants there, too, so they could bask in the west-facing sunshine. And the Christmas cactus exploded into beautiful, waxy, riotous bloom. These are merely the first flowers; the plant is loaded with buds. There are more to come. The flowers bloomed at the start of Advent; I am hoping there will still be a bloom or two on Christmas Day.
That little plant just needed its own time. The lessons I keep trying to learn after a long and meandering teaching career and something like forty-five years as a stepmom and mama come back: things bloom in their own time. And just because something hasn't bloomed, that doesn't doesn't mean it's not going to.
I may be teetering on the edge of my own November roof, but it's not too late to learn.
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This week we stood on a green hillside outside a tiny brick country church; we stood in front of a blue tarp sheltering a freshly dug grave. Judy's grave: we were there to say a sudden and shocked goodbye.
Judy was an essential member of our retirees' lunch group; she was quiet, but her thoughtful questions kept the conversation flowing. Did you finish that project? she would ask. How was your trip?
Judy remembered what others talked about. She was always positive, always enthusiastic. She seldom talked about herself, which never registered because she was always so interested in everyone else's doings.
Judy was tiny and fit; she drove a red sports car. The day before her heart attack, her husband said, she was up on a ladder, cleaning.
How is it possible that Judy is gone?
The officiant read a poem, a poem my mother copied out in her Palmer method handwriting and tucked into my sister Sharon's scrapbook seventy-odd years ago. I tried to find the words online, but there are many, many variations. I couldn't locate the exact one, but the meaning was this: the dead person is saying, "I am not gone; I am just…away."
Judy hasn't ended, the officiant said. She just lives, now, in another realm.
Judy's absence leaves a huge vacuum here, a staggering one for her devoted husband. But it comforts to think that she could be blooming somewhere else, somewhere beyond our understanding.
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Someone I know, after long, hard years of grieving, has taken steps that might lead to a new relationship. They are both cautious, in the talking stages, making tentative plans for a face-to-face meet. They don't know what this will lead to…friendship, companionship,…love? Or maybe just a momentary flare that will extinguish quietly.
They don't know.
But they are open to taking chances, to finding out.
They are open to waiting, to see if something blooms.
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The tree up, the rest of the house, decked out in oranges, browns, and golds,—autumn finery—looked a little incongruous. So I pulled out bins and separated newspapers and packed away gilded turkeys and ceramic acorns and little plates that read, "Grateful" and "Give thanks."
In the powder room, a spray of artificial flowers, brassy Crayola orange, sat jauntily in a ceramic moose vase. Next to them was a stack of books with orange covers.
I bagged up the flowers and shelved the books. I made a small stack of red and green books and slid them onto the powder room shelf.
I thought, "I'll have to go buy some Christmassy silk flowers."
And then I went outside, and I realized the holly bushes, the ones we inherited from the wonderful gardeners who inhabited this space before we moved in, are loaded with fat red berries.
I got the clippers out of the black canvas garden tools bag and went out and clipped prickly beautiful sprigs of glossy holly, and I filled the moose vase with those.
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Autumn has left the bathroom. It's winter in there now, with reds and greens and holly berries.
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But it doesn't matter what time of year it is, what our losses have been, what we fear, or what we've given up: things bloom.
Even in December, things bloom .
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