meet the tomatoes

to say that i have a green thumb would be a lie. it would be like saying that all of those years of ballet molded me into a graceful woman who doesn't run into the coffee table a minimum of four times a day. question: how many times can you bruise your shins in the same spot before it becomes permanent? because i think i'm reaching my quota.
can i blame my mother for this whole lack of a green thumb thing? why not, we can blame her for so many other things. why didn't she share her green thumb with me? why didn't we have those mother daughter moments where we both kneel down in the lovely earth and plant things. in fact, when, exactly, did she do the planting? in between laying in bed banging on the wall with a hairbrush to summon me downstairs to hand her her purse, and watching 'all my children'? whenever it was, i appeared not to ever be around for that. what i was around for was the daily watering of all of the flowers on those summer mornings, and for the occasional weeding of the entire front yard. this, by the way, was not a bonding experience, but a chore that i completed solo. did i complain? my memory shows me complaining in my head but being a very obedient little girl. i think my sisters memories show a different little pest. i think they remember wrong. anyhoo. the weeds. the watering. none of it prepared me for growing tomatoes. and let's face it, i live in new york city. this black thumb thing hasn't affected me too terribly much, aside from the fact that i can't even keep an aloe or a jade plant alive. yes, i know that even an idiot could keep those plants alive. i can't.
enter emilia piechota. don't ask me how to pronounce her name. she works with me, and every time i have to call her name in a list of 20 others whose last names i'm pronouncing correctly, i hope she thinks i'm only calling her by her first name because we're such buddies. why don't i just ask her how to pronounce it, you wonder? i think i have, and trying to replicate her polish accent proves impossible for me. which is surprising since in greenpoint, i live among 20,000 polish people. no exaggeration. maybe i could ask her husband, pawel (pah-vel) szczesniak....uh, nevermind.
so one day emilia starts chatting with me about her tomatoes. and her cucumbers and bell peppers and all of the lovely things she's growing in her BACKYARD. she tells me i could totally grow tomatoes on my fire escape. clearly she's mistaken me for one of her kind, whose gaze doesn't cause a plant to shrivel up and die. so i just nod and go along with the fantasy. but the next day she brings me 2 tomato plants in a plastic bag. one she has purchased for me, and one she has sacrificed from her own garden. i feel weepy with her kindness. i imagine she is my mother and we are elbow deep in the verdant soil of my fire escape. except it's hard to imagine her as a mother for long because a) she's younger than i and b) she's one of those stone cold foxy polish chicks who populate my neighborhood and give me serious ego checks when i'm just buying toilet paper at the corner store. because they are all skinny, tall, with perfect yet random burgundy and blonde highlights in their stylishly cut hair and perfect smoky eye make up that you only see in the how-to section of magazines.
so she tells me that all i have to do it plants these little guys, bury an egg below their roots, and water them every day. and voila, tomatoes. skeptically and nervously i visit the polish nursery and come away with a couple of pots, soil and eggs (well, for those i had to pay a visit to the foxy chick at the corner store). i decide to name my tomato plants pawel and emilia, and hope they don't die. but it turns out that emila is actually FOUR tomato plants. wow. i have to visit the nursery again because they swear i can't just plant them next to each other. more pots, more soil. but i do plant one emilia in the big pot with pawel. it seems romantic and appropriate. and i water them every day. and lo and behold, they grown like happy little weeds--seemingly oblivious to the toxic nature of their master--and one day a tiny little baby tomato (!) appears on emilia #2!!!! i scream with delight. possibly there are tears in my eyes. the coming days bring more little baby tomatoes and they grow and grow and i feel like a mother. suddenly i get the whole baby obsession. the tomatoes are my babies and i want to share their growth with the world. this is the first time i get an inkling that i'd like a blog. just so i can blog every day about my tomatoes. except i'm not a great mother because i never take pictures of them. i'm busy keeping them alive. finally the fruit grows big and resembles real live tomatoes, turns red. it seems wrong to eat them! but with emre's anxious help, i overcome that obstacle and soon we are eating delicious, if not somewhat deformed tomatoes (hey, i'm an organic farmer here, whattaya want?!) every day. my friend ola (ooh-lah) gets a kick out of saying to emilia at work, "emilia, when i was at kitty's house the other day, i ate one of you and one of pawel!"
when i'm picking the tomatoes, i discover a familiar smell. it's the smell of the yellow stuff the stems leave behind on my hands. it holds a memory.....aha!! i have grown tomatoes before! i remember my great-grandpa sug (shoog) and how every summer he'd plant a vegetable garden and i'd spend mornings tending it with him. then we'd sit on the front porch for hours drinking country time lemonade out of cans. his hands always smelled like that: life tomato earth...oh, i can't describe it. i'll get back to you on how it smells. every time i pick a tomato off my fire escape i think of him. so above you see the 2nd year babies on their planting day--may 19th, 2007. i vowed to photograph them exactly once a week to chart their progress here, because i know that would be really interesting to my three readers (hi amy, mieke and kim!). but alas, already i've strayed. below you see the babies a week and a half old. my how they grow!! this year i planted yellow heirloom tomatoes, red cherry tomatoes and yellow bell peppers!! big experiment on the bell peppers. and how's this for emilia's wisdom? the peppers are the ones in the long pot on the right. there are three plants. i ran out of eggs and had to plant the center one without an egg. notice it is less than half the size of the other two.....