Today’s offering comes to us from Jacqueline Mathers, an author, purveyor, and prognosticator, who lives on both the West Coast as well as currently on top of a hill in Western Massachusetts. She creates hoodoo curios and reads the tarot while being an avid “bird mother” to a pair of cardinals and “that thieving blue jay” outside her office window.
This year was a summer to celebrate – maybe more than ever before for me, and for many reasons.
I moved across the country four years ago, from the West Coast to the east, and in all that time I had never been home at the right time to plant tomatoes. I always had obligations and duties that kept me from cultivating a portion of my yard into a little garden, a vision I have had since we bought our home here. Each spring and into the early summer, I found myself somewhere else, busy with work or personal obligations, and I missed my window of opportunity. This year, at last, I had the chance to gather seedlings from the local nursery, nurture them into bearing fruit throughout the summer, and savor the goodness of a few homegrown tomatoes.
A basket of tomatoes next to a bottle of olive oil [Pixabay]
I decided to raise my six tomato seedlings in pots instead of planting them in the ground – I dreaded that tomato hornworms would bore holes into my “babies.” As the summer went on, I developed habits: each morning I would come out and talk to and stroke their skin as I checked the soil moisture level. I would flick my finger across each bloom, making sure that if the bumblebee did not do his part in the reproductive cycle, each flower would bear fruit. I would coo to them from when they were just a blueberry-sized nub of an embryo to their time of prepubescent growth. I told them I loved them and couldn’t wait until they got big and ready to pick. I’d snap photos of my plants to send to the grandkids, showing them what their grandma was doing this summer while they were off to swimming lessons and soccer conditioning, far away in California.
There was something looming overhead each day as I tended to my tomatoes, however – overcast skies. While the weather reports would promise sunny days, my plants ended up getting far less than the six hours of sunlight they needed to come to maturity for the harvest. Each cloudy afternoon provided a sprinkling of much-needed rain to fill the reservoirs but also delayed the tomatoes from becoming a delicious addition to a burger or salad on my plate. The wait was a little like waiting for Christmas morning: the promise of the wrapping paper over cardboard boxes titillated us with fantasies of the gifts that lay beneath.
Isn’t this the same scenario taking place in every human’s heart right now? We are all anticipating life delivering us the “fruits of our labors,” bringing us back to the normality that we knew just 18 months ago. It seems like a distant memory, but still recall it so well.
I was speaking with the postal clerk the other day as I was mailing a package and she apologized that, although the receipt said one date for the anticipated delivery, there might be a delay because of the downturn in employment that many businesses are seeing due to the pandemic. I told her that it seems like the universe heard our griping about how unfulfilling our lives were two years ago, and said, “just you wait!” Could it be that a collected amount of human energy “flipped the script” and put in place the events that we have been experienced? Did our grumbling reach fate’s ears?
A gardener planting seedlings in the soil [Pixabay]
Me, I’m trying to get the tomato harvest in this year. I’m still hoping for a return to my life like it was before the pandemic, with unlimited laughter and feasts, travels, and hugs. These are the whispers to my gods and goddesses this year. Another candle, one more glass of rum, cups of black coffee with sugar – all the things I share so that I can return to festivals and music, milling about museums and dining out.
Perhaps as a collective of humans, we can whisper an incantation for a return to life as it was in each of our lives. Fate, or at least the universe, may hear us. If the phrase “from our lips to the gods’ ears” can be thought of as true, let us not complain about the inconveniences we had before COVID. In hindsight, there were not as bad as we thought. We can leave them behind.
Until then, I will keep whispering to my plants, and wait for them to grow.
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