Looking Out: The last tomato

by Jim Whitehouse

Tomatoes.

Wonderful things are tomatoes.

Every spring when I plant tomatoes in our garden, I anticipate eating one of those sun warmed beauties picked right off the plant and scoffing at the memory of the rock-hard flavorless store-bought fruits of winter.

Every day, I watch the little shrubs grow, I watch the blossoms appear and the tiny fruits start to form, then expand, then start to turn from green to blush to red. I can’t wait until that first one is finally perfectly ripe.

The problem is, my beloved wife Marsha is exactly the same.

Who will eat that first tomato? It is always a little bitty cherry tomato—the full-sized goddesses of the vine come much later.

“Go ahead, Honey,” I say as we stand there looking at that first solitary red fruit. “You eat it.”

“No. No. You eat it,” she says.

“I insist. You eat it. You deserve it, even though I planted it, watered it, fertilized it and pulled a few little weeds growing around it,” I say to myself, not letting so much as a sigh escape my lips.

She eats it and goes back inside the house.  I stay there, fiddling around adjusting the leaves and branches in the cage surrounding the tomato plants.

Wait a minute! What do I see, lurking back in behind some of the leaves?

Wow!  Two bright red cherry tomatoes, hiding from the light. Hiding from my eyes until now. More importantly, hiding from Marsha’s eyes.

“One for me, one for her,” I say aloud to the birds of the sky and beasts of the forest. I carefully pluck the ruby red orbs from their stems and study them. They are perfect.

“One for this side of my mouth, one for the other side,” I tell the beasts and birds, and both of the tomatoes disappear down my gullet.

Summer progresses, and there is an abundance of cherry tomatoes. We pick, clean and eat a bowlful every day, downing them like candy.

Alas, our big tomatoes are a near-total failure this year, succumbing to some little wormy bugs that bore into them and ruin them. We have enough for a nightly caprese and an occasional BLT, but not enough for homemade marinara and salsa.  This summer, it has been The Cherry Tomato Show.

Now, as summer fades and fall edges in, the leaves are yellow, the stems are brown. But amazingly little green tomatoes still turn red, and our daily harvest continues. The volume has dwindled to a handful.  No more bowls of tomatoes. Now, it is just one half of a paper towel on which the washed orbs have dried.

And whichever one of us goes out to harvest may eat a few right off the plant.

Today is the day for me to go out and pull out the dead plants with no remaining cherries. To fold up the square cages and tuck them away until next spring. It is a sad day.

But, as Chaucer would have said, “What ho!”  There are still some branches bearing fruit! I pick the ripe ones, eating a few. I leave the green ones.  I carefully prune the brown and unproductive stalks, leaving skeleton plants with a few still viable green spheres.

“Look what I found!” I exclaim to Marsha as I put the handful of ripe tomatoes on the counter. 

“Wow!” she says. “Are there any more left out there?”

“Not a one,” I say to myself. “All gone. Dead as doornails. Finis!”

“Believe it or not, there are still a few more ripening,” I say aloud, feeling generous and proud of myself for not lying about the remaining treasure trove.

But I sleep with one eye open, just in case she decides to creep out there in the night with a flashlight and get them all.