LOVE APPLE
By: Denise Kumani Gantt
Tags: Creativity, Life Lessons, Gardening, Grief, Spirituality

LOVE APPLE

First tomato of 2020, Dwarf Pink Passion

The year my mother died, I planted a thousand tomato seeds for a yard that can only sustain ten plants. This is the kind of insanity that grief breeds.

She died in early January 2019. By February, my narrow windowsills teemed with exotic names — Azoychka, Costoluto Genovese sel Valente — Druzba. I grew so many black tomatoes — Crimee de Noire, Black from Tula, Cherokee Purple — Weaver’s Black Brandywine, but in my haste to escape the pain, I forgot to lay down seed for my penultimate black — Paul Robeson.

Every day, I watched the seedlings like an expectant mother, waited for their cotyledons to fall off and true leaves to fracture the light.

__________

When I began to transplant the fragile seedlings in March, I half-expected my mother to join me at the kitchen table. I soaked the plants in liquid kelp and placed the healthiest ones into red plastic cups; their names scrawled on masking tape with a black sharpie. During these early days of mourning, my body would freeze mid-action, and I would remember as a kind of afterthought that my mother would never sit with me again.

Instead of her, it was the Grim Reaper who kept me company during my annual transplanting ritual. Sometimes, a seedling would snap at the roots, or I would play god and decide it was too misshapen to go on. All these misfits were wrapped in newspaper and hesitantly discarded.

It’s no wonder I compost now. Death is everywhere in the garden.

__________

Early May, I moved the much larger tomato plants to their final resting place. Into each grow bag, I added Epsom salt, organic fertilizer, alfalfa meal, garden lime, and two aspirins to strengthen the plants’ resolve — to ward off death. Sitting in a rusted garden chair, I burned far too much nag champa and blasted Nina Simone as loud as possible, making sure to sing all the lyrics to Four Women at the top of my lungs, hoping one brave neighbor would tell me to turn my music down.

None of them did, of course. They didn’t bring over a covered dish either or send a sympathy card with our deepest condolence printed on the inside. Most of our neighbors were silent about my mother’s death in that neglectful, disaffected way suburbia is famous for. After months of escalating rage, I was ready for a confrontation.

But it never came.

Just as my mother felt the fifty-one years she endured this corner lot, I was invisible.

__________

By July 2019, there were more than forty tomato plants haphazardly positioned throughout the backyard. It was an obstacle course. I staked the plants in ways that made the yard more reminiscent of a torture chamber than a garden. The ones I didn’t have time to transplant spent their entire existence in those cups — some even dared to push out a solitary tomato that would never fully develop.

Life has a way of going on no matter the circumstances.

My mother’s last months were spent between hospitals and rehab centers, yet she only signed a DNR five days before dying. She was tough, and I’ll never forget the defeat in her eyes as she scribbled her name on the dotted line, then turned her head and refused to talk to me. By then, I had become the bad guy and was getting used to our constant fights about her unwillingness to eat or do physical therapy. We were only twenty years apart in age, and somewhere during the end of her illness, our roles got all mixed up and reversed.

Finally, the day came when I had to get rid of the excess plants. What a waste, but there was nowhere to shove another Dr. Wychie’s or Girl Girl’s Weird Thing. As I removed the plants from the cups and placed them into yard refuse bags, I bent back the stems (to guarantee I wouldn’t pull them out) and whispered to each one, thank you for sharing your life.

I still hadn’t cried in that gut-wrenching, snot-producing way. The tears flowed easier for the tomato plants.

They were perfect surrogates for my pain.

__________

My mother loved homegrown tomatoes. Before I learned how to garden, we religiously stopped at a house up the road on Route 152 where an elderly woman had a tomato stand. What a bargain — four tomatoes for a buck! They were nothing exotic, just red and delicious, and had what seed catalogs love to describe as that good old-fashioned taste.

I suppose it was an omen when the tomatoes never arrived in 2017. By the end of summer, an estate sale sign popped up in the front yard instead.

Mom, a.k.a. E.T.

Two years later, it was easy to believe my mother’s ghost was as impatient as I was waiting for that first ripe tomato. Mom despised mayonnaise and preferred her love apples almost naked. She’d slice them open, place salt on their innards, then swoon.

A foodie long before there was such a word, she learned to make spaghetti sauce from an Italian woman she babysat for in Philadelphia during the ’50s. In 1969, we became the first black family on the block, in what she and my father sarcastically called a cardboard suburb.

Maryland never became home to my mom, her heart forever tethered to the city of brotherly, sisterly love. The nicknames her friends and three brothers gave her describe her best: Sis, Aunt Sis, Bell, Stella by Starlight, and even E.T. Only in the land of Old Bay and submarine sandwiches (she never stopped calling them hoagies) did she acquire her final moniker, Nana, after my daughter, her only grandchild was born.

Like so many women of her era, my mother left a thousand dreams splattered on the kitchen floor. She had an I.Q. over 180, but her aspirations came second to my father’s and, therefore, often went unmet. No wonder she poured so much hope into me. Though we were close, Mom never understood the single mama blues that could sometimes overtake me. From her perspective, never marrying meant I was free, though for so long, I felt unwanted — in that hooked up, found my soulmate, kind of way.

Toward the end of her life, she developed the habit of saying, it is, what it is, whenever bad news came her way. What a cruel trick multiple myeloma played on her body, shrinking her regal 5'11" frame to a stooped 5'4". Afraid of the resignation in her voice, I’d agitate her by retorting, but what is, is?

The only reason I could say such a stupid thing is that I didn’t believe my mother could die. Not really, even though I had seen others take their last breath.

But losing your mother is different. There’s no place for philosophical treatises when Azrael swoops down and steals away the one who brought you here.

The loss of your mother is a forever kind of journey.

_______

Anyone who grows tomatoes knows there are good years and bad. Years like 2019, when you harvest buckets brimming with delicious fruit, and others like 2020 when absolutely everything goes wrong. The love apple, solanum lycopersicum, hails from Central and South America, not Maryland, the land of too much rain or not enough. There are so many enemies lurking in the Free State — the heat and humidity, as well as viral and bacterial diseases that can take out a tomato plant in a day.

Of course, some years are just plain too much — growing tomatoes as much a gambit as figuring out how to live when your mother has died. Friends tell you it will take at least two years to feel like yourself again. Sorry sister, they admit, there will be no more good days. Face it, you’ve watched your naivete depart in a body bag — you can’t unsee that.

Your only consolation prize the moment when you’re reborn from your mother’s ashes — but don’t expect to be the same.

__________

In October, I was still clipping diseased leaves from the plants in a futile attempt to stop death, but everything that makes the soil sweet comes from decomposition. My mother weighed less than 90 pounds the last time I saw her alive. As her breath waned, the plants outside her hospice window whistled in the cold evening air like the dead tomato plants I didn’t have the will to bury.

It’s almost the end of 2020 — thank god. I sit alone in a dimly lit room filled with boxes and boxes of seeds. A universe of potential surrounds me. As I plan next year’s garden, my brother, the more practical of my mother’s two children, thinks I should grow fewer tomatoes, but I probably won’t.

I’m sure I’ll regret the decision. By August, the garden will feel like a full-time job, and if I’m brutally honest — look a hot mess. There won’t be enough hours in the day to keep up with the endless weeding, spraying, and pruning. Plus, once the tomatoes start to ripen en mass, I’ll be at war with my arch enemy, the squirrels, who, yes, ate just about every tomato off of Alice’s Dream this year.

Who knew they had favorites?

Despite the disappointments, I can’t wait to get back out there, with my headwrap and duck boots on, looking like a middle-aged, black girl Sisyphus shaking her fists at the gods.

So much has lost its flavor since my mother's death — but when I’m gardening, I’m a child again, consumed by wonder. And well, that in itself is a miracle.

My friends were right — I’m different now.

Growing tomatoes the one place where I can find my mother and not collapse. In my garden, salt tastes like sweat, not sorrow. If I could, I would plant a thousand acres of love apples, and even that would not be enough to cry her back to me.