The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  “Oh, hi,” she yawned. “I did. Four hours’ worth. Now I’m sleeping.” She rolled over to one side, signaling her desire to end the conversation.

  I wasn’t done. “You sure you were in our garden? What did you do?”

  She rolled back to face my sarcasm. “I deadheaded the cosmos and marigolds and tied up the asters.”

  Say what? I was incredulous. The garden was weedier than an abandoned lot, yet Anne chose to spend her four hours removing inconspicuous dead flower blossoms? I didn’t want to start a fight, but I couldn’t just let it go, either. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. “I thought you were going to weed. The beds are a disaster.”

  “Oh, are they? I’ll do them next weekend.” She yawned again. She hadn’t even noticed the weedy beds that were screaming at me every time I came within fifty feet.

  “Next weekend! The garden will look like the Amazon by next weekend.” For someone who didn’t want to start a fight, I was hurtling down a weed-choked path of no return. “I don’t understand it. How could you not notice the weeds? You do this all the time. You say you’re going to help out in the garden, but you don’t do the things I need help with. You just tend to your damn flowers.” Uh-oh. I wished that hadn’t slipped out.

  Anne fumed, “I needed to work with the flowers today. Next week I’ll weed.” She rolled to her side, facing away from me, an alpha gorilla showing me her rump. Now the conversation really was over.

  I was beaten. I tossed my towel and goggles angrily to the ground and headed up to the garden, where I attacked the weeds with a fury, misusing my shuffle hoe as an instrument of warfare rather than horticulture, separating the weeds from their life-giving roots with fierce “take that!” strokes. But in the serenity of the garden, surrounded by butterflies and bumblebees, I soon sweated out my fury, settling into my soothing shuffle-hoe rhythm, to and fro, slice and rake, reflecting on our fight. I came to understand that Anne saw nothing at all incongruous about her morning in the garden. Her goal that morning was a few hours of relaxation—deadheading, tying, cutting flowers for the house. My goal for the morning had nothing to do with the pleasures of gardening and everything to do with the often unrewarding but necessary work of gardening. Our agendas for the morning—which were not well communicated—were quite different. In fact our approaches to the garden in general are quite different.

  I am goal driven in the garden. I head out there with a job to do, and I don’t leave until it’s finished. Anne heads to the garden when she feels like gardening, and unless I specifically direct her, she will spend the next few hours pursuing whatever activity brings her the most gratification. Now, there really is nothing intrinsically wrong with that; in fact, undoubtedly her attitude is far healthier than mine. She looks at the garden and sees the beauty and the peacefulness of it and disappears into the thick flowers, luxuriating in the sunshine. At those times, she becomes part of the garden herself, an animated garden statue. Sometimes, unseen, I watch her, her swimmer’s shoulders rippling as she works the soil, beads of perspiration gathering on her forehead underneath a worn straw hat, her feet shod in red garden clogs. Occasionally she pauses to unselfconsciously perform a lovely, almost balletic maneuver, straightening up, arching her back, and wiping her brow. And I feel very lucky.

  If she wants an obelisk, well, maybe I should just agree.

  But six feet tall, and pink? And there was just something about it, something vaguely unsettling.

  YET I’VE SEEN WORSE than garden obelisks. People do put strange things in their gardens, things much stranger. I confess I am not a big fan of ornaments and artwork in the garden. I don’t mind a birdbath or a sundial, or even a Henry Moore, but I don’t see where a glass gazing ball adds anything. And the thought of all that broken glass in the beds is unnerving.

  Which might explain the popularity of plywood. There is a seemingly endless variety of plywood cutouts you can plant in your garden, from Huck Finn to howling coyotes to the classic bad-taste garden ornament of all time: a cutout of a stout woman bending over, revealing her bloomers. You might know the one, and admit it, you smiled the first time you saw it. And maybe the second. But surely not the third. I guess it’s supposed to be cute, maybe even funny, but it just makes me cringe.

  Some ornaments I find merely puzzling. A neighbor has a life-size ceramic deer in his yard. A deer! Excuse me, but in the Hudson Valley, putting a ceramic deer in your yard is like putting fake snow on the North Pole. What, there aren’t enough of the real ones? Or could it be a kind of reverse decoy? Maybe the homeowner thinks this stud muffin with his twelve-point antlers will stake out the territory and intimidate the real ones into staying away. I’d be surprised if that worked, since dogs, loud noises, and pointing my finger and yelling, “Bang!” from ten feet away doesn’t even cause them to flinch. Every time I pass by the house with the fake deer, I look over, hoping to see a real buck humping this dopey statue. I’ve noticed that you don’t see many of these deer statues outside of town, in the rural areas. And if you do, they usually have bullet holes in them. Seriously.

  Want a garden ornament that moves? You’re in luck. Choose from a mind-boggling array of windmills, elves, whirligigs, and the poor woodsman who, prompted by the slightest breeze, chops at the same piece of wood eternally with his dull ax. These crafts are apparently created by people to whom miniature-golf courses represent haute architecture.

  Perhaps you lean more toward the whimsical. Have you seen the statue of the rear end of a dog (the rest of it is burrowing in the ground)? How quaint.

  No money to spend? No problem. Look around your garage. If Hudson Valley backyard artists can make garden sculpture out of discarded hubcaps, satellite dishes, and scrap sheet metal, you, too, can get that shabby-chic look without spending a dime.

  When does a garden ornament become a garden structure? We found out while we were trying to sell our Yonkers house. I arrived home after a long day at the office to find a huge wooden structure looming over our postage stamp of a backyard. The neighbor whose backyard abutted ours had, in a single day while Anne and I had been at work, erected an enormous two-story pergola. Anne arrived a few minutes later and screamed. We felt as if we were living under a skyscraper. How on earth were we going to sell the house with that monstrosity, nearly as tall as our yard was deep, towering over us?

  “You have to talk to him,” Anne said. I get all the dirty jobs. “Be nice.”

  “I’m always nice.” I winked as she rolled her eyes.

  Oh, boy. I wasn’t looking forward to this. I gathered my courage and walked around the block to explain the situation nicely to the neighbor, whom I knew casually, one of those suburban over-the-fence relationships where neither neighbor has ever seen the other one below the neck. He didn’t say much that evening, and I left feeling my mission had failed, but to our surprise he disassembled the structure the next day, either because he was sympathetic to our plight, or perhaps because I seemed desperate enough to pursue the matter with the city, and he hadn’t obtained a building permit.

  Size, as they say, isn’t everything. The most tasteless garden ornament I have ever seen is only a couple of feet tall. It is right here in town, in a neighbor’s border garden. The house is on the route Anne and I take on our evening walks, and even in the dead of night, this stone object seems to absorb whatever moonlight or starlight is present and emit it back into the night with an eerie glow. We have walked by it hundreds of times, yet each time we pass, we still shake our heads in wonder and disbelief. Let me try to describe it.

  It is a small statue, between two and three feet tall, light gray, which sits prominently among the pachysandra. The rough, textured stone is an aggregate, full of ocean pebbles, suggesting a sedimentary rock formed and shaped over billions of years of erosion, settling, compression, and wind (or alternatively, fifteen minutes in a cement mixer). The statue is crude, primitive in nature, vaguely reminiscent of an ancient Polynesian statue. In fact, it definitely looks like a primi
tive totem, an item of worship rather than one of decoration.

  It is difficult to say whether its shape was formed by the forces of nature or a human hand. The stone rises erectly from the ground, the base a firm cylinder, or shaft, if you will, that flares out slightly near the top to form a bulbous cap, or head. This head is an elongated hemisphere (taller than it is wide) whose diameter is just slightly wider than that of the shaft on which it sits. In other words, the stone is a thick shaft with a rounded, flared head.

  It is a stone phallus. A penis. Now, one might argue that this lovely piece of sculpture is really meant to evoke a mushroom, but let me tell you, I have seen plenty of mushrooms and plenty of mushroom garden ornaments (with and without the little leprechaun under the cap), and this is no mushroom. Anne, who ought to know, having seen (as a physician, I hasten to add) more penises than the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, concurs: this is undoubtedly, unequivocally, unambiguously a penis, a totem penis.

  What on earth is this thing doing in this man’s garden? Has he seen one too many Fellini movies? It is such a weird object. I have visions of him coming out at midnight, kneeling before his totem, worshiping and making (who knows what kind of) a sacrifice. Spooky.

  I can’t figure out whether he’s enjoying a small act of effrontery or is merely, like most gardeners, oblivious. Because we are oblivious. People—all people, including me—have no objectivity when it comes to their driving, their cooking, or their gardens. How else to explain stout ladies in bloomers, other than a total lack of objectivity about one’s own garden?

  THUS SURROUNDED BY the tacky, the tasteless, and the vulgar, I was determined to keep the pink obelisk out of my garden. I didn’t need to give the neighbors any more reasons to be pointing at my garden and laughing. Not to mention the fact that we already had one phallic symbol in the neighborhood; I didn’t want to be responsible for starting a trend.

  We did have one ornament for a few years, a hefty, solid-brass sundial that even correctly told the time (but only two days of the year). Unable to find a suitable base on which to mount it, I had built a tripod base out of cedar fence posts, but I couldn’t seem to secure the sundial to the base properly, so whenever a strong wind blew, the sundial blew off the tripod. Every time it happened, I was surprised. This was one hefty piece of metal, but the wind would get under it and flip it like a Frisbee. The kids thought the tripod looked, as they delicately put it, “stupid,” so, tired of picking the sundial off the ground and defending the tripod to my family, I eventually took it down until I could find a decent pedestal. This turned out to be a mistake, because nature abhors a vacuum, and a certain piece of pink granite was ready to step in to fill it.

  I found myself holding my breath and peering expectantly into the back of the station wagon every Saturday when Anne returned from her weekly shopping at the green market and garden center (conveniently located in the same location). Anne looked at the obelisk every week. I know she looked at it. But weeks went by, and the obelisk remained in the garden center, beckoning, biding its time. I think the expense of the object was holding her off as much as my disapproval. But then something strange and unexpected happened.

  I started to kind of like it.

  I began to see why Anne was attracted to it (without delving too deep into Freudian psychology). It had a beautiful texture, not polished, but not rough, either. Its smoothness somehow gave the unyielding stone a soft feel. And even on a hot summer day, it felt cool to the touch. I found myself walking by it whenever I was at the garden center, rubbing my hand on the stone knob at its top as I passed. It would certainly last a lifetime—several lifetimes—and would only improve with age and weathering. And perhaps if we ran our hands over the granite sphere each time we passed, it would eventually take on a soft, hand-rubbed patina, and generations from now, gardeners not yet born would run their hands over it and feel the wear from ours.

  On the other hand, it was six feet tall, and pink.

  But I told Anne we should think about it, and I could see the joy in her eyes. But no rush, I told her. It wasn’t like it was going anywhere; it had been in the same spot for two years. And she agreed it was awfully expensive. So now price was really the only impediment holding us back. Thank goodness it was expensive. Then in October something else unexpected happened.

  It went on sale.

  The pink obelisk with the ball on top was marked down 40 percent. Anne was excited, but I still had my lingering doubts about the object. Forget my hand-rubbed patina—future generations will have plenty of other reminders of me; they’ll still be picking my Kentucky bluegrass out of the tomato bed. But having opened the door a crack, I was having a hard time closing it. Anne seemed determined not to let this sale opportunity pass, and even I was thinking it was now or never. But still, there was just something about it, something that made me uneasy, something I wasn’t able to put my finger on. But 40 percent off…

  The obelisk was still on sale when we went for a family drive in the country, looking for pumpkins. As we were driving, Anne said excitedly, “Oh, look, an obelisk.” I looked over. Sure enough. A big obelisk. Cool. And there was another. And another. I’d never seen so many obelisks, big ones, little ones, gray ones, white ones! What was this wondrous place, this enchanted land of obelisks?

  A voice from the backseat: “Dad, why are we driving to a cemetery?”

  A little, muffled cry escaped from Anne’s hand-covered mouth. It was a cemetery, and the obelisks were gravestones. Naïfs (okay, idiots) that we are, this came as a huge revelation to us both. So that’s what the “something” was about it that I couldn’t put my finger on, that association I couldn’t quite place: it’s funerary! Of course! How could we not know that? And just like that, the spell was broken, and the thought of a pink granite obelisk in the garden seemed as absurd to us as, well, a stone phallus.

  Maybe I’ll build a new tripod for the sundial.

  Harvest Jam

  For I have had too much

  Of apple-picking: I am overtired

  Of the great harvest I myself desired.

  —Robert Frost, “After Apple-picking”

  It was approaching midnight in the kitchen, and I could hardly keep my eyes open. After putting in full days at our jobs, Anne and I had turned the clock back to 1850 and spent the night canning peaches like all good homesteaders. Hours of nonstop peeling, slicing, packing. Peeling, slicing, packing. We wasted nothing: the overripe peaches went into peach sauce (delicious ladled warm over vanilla ice cream); the firm ones got canned. The way we salvaged every scrap, you’d think we were a family who had to live off the land, rather than a couple of professionals who were doing this for fun. At least, it used to be fun.

  In past years, we looked forward to and enjoyed this annual event despite the hard work and resulting layer of sticky peach juice that covered everything in the kitchen, including us. The ritual, apart from its appealing quaintness, seemed in some way to validate our way of life and the hard work that went into building the garden and orchard, and reinforced our philosophy of eating and buying locally. (And as the peach tree is ten steps from the kitchen, you can’t get any more local.) We developed a reliable and comforting routine over the years: an early dinner, get the kids to bed, slip some Joni Mitchell into the CD player, and haul the equipment down from the attic. Then, hours of canning while we worked, sang, flirted, and sweated before falling into bed, sticky and exhausted. That was then.

  This particular year it felt more like a chore than a joy, an evening of acting out a ritual that no longer held any real meaning or purpose. Our main goal seemed to be to use up the blasted peaches that were assaulting us with their sheer number. We both kept sneaking glances at the bushel basket, watching the level drop depressingly slowly until we were out of jars and stamina—but not peaches. I secretly suspected that, outside in the dark, peaches were ripening faster than we were processing.

  Unlike apples, peaches have a short shelf life, and truly tree-ripened peaches (as
opposed to peaches picked rock hard for shipment to market) have a shelf life closer to hours than to days. Thus there is an inevitable degree of pressure associated with the harvesting and use of them: there’s no putting it off till next week. Once you’ve made the pies, the cobblers, the fruit salads, and the melba, there’s nothing to do but preserve. And it is rather thrilling to be eating your own peaches in January as the snow falls, when summer is a distant memory. But this year the business of canning just seemed overwhelming, and as I stood in the kitchen sweating over the boiling water, I wondered what was different. Had I lost my interest in the ritual? If so, what did that imply, for gardening is largely about ritual, from the starting of seeds under fluorescent lights to the final turning over of the beds. Indeed it is the very ritual of gardening, the comfort of repeating something familiar year after year, that keeps many of us coming back every spring. I pondered that thought while Anne and I continued peeling, slicing, packing; peeling, slicing, packing. Something unspoken was hanging in the moist kitchen air, lingering like the smell of rotten fruit.

  The bottomless bushel basket of peaches on the kitchen table started me thinking about the entire process of harvesting and storing and preserving. When I first started growing, I never gave it a thought. You grow things, you eat them. Or more accurately, you grow things, and the deer, groundhogs, beetles, and webworms eat them, and you eat what’s left. But as I became a successful gardener, something almost unexpected was happening: I was producing food. Lots of it. As in two hundred pounds of apples. Bushels of peaches. Fifty pounds of potatoes. In a good year (and many were not), baskets of tomatoes, cucumbers, and leeks. Which meant that I was no longer “picking” fruits and vegetables; I was now, well, harvesting. I had become part of that ancient tradition of harvesting and storing.

  The harvest holds a revered, even mystical, place in virtually every society on the planet. Even Americans whose hands have never touched soil observe Thanksgiving and sing “Shine On Harvest Moon,” which celebrates the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox—the moon that lights up the fields for the season’s final harvest. Although most of the ancient harvest rites have vanished, the tradition of the harvest festival still exists today, from Africa to Canada; it’s a time of community celebration, of postharvest dances, parties, and weddings.