Upside-Down Pear

We moved into this house, with its backyard covered in gravel. Under the gravel was hardpacked clay, deader than dead.

So I started a container vegetable garden. Oh, I cleared the gravel and amended the soil and there are lilies and lavender galore there now, not to mention two thriving rosebushes and several young lilacs. But the edibles are all container-grown: blueberry bushes too young to fruit, scallions and kale, beans, cucumbers, basil and sage and oregano and rosemary.

And tomatoes.

We came home from vacation on Saturday to find that four tomatoes - ‘Bloody Butcher’ variety, an heirloom whose seeds were gifted to me by my friend Lynn - had just come ripe. Before even unloading the car, I nipped them from the plant, savoring their intense scent, their perfect softness, their gleaming green-shouldered skins.

I ate one by itself late that night: sweet sunripe flavor, sharp tang, perfect texture.

Today I made sandwiches with two more: chicken breasts seared with rosemary from the garden, fresh-ground pepper, orange-honey mustard, toasted Tuscan-style bread, and sliced tomato. The tomato flirted with the rosemary, blended softly with the mustard, accented the chicken. The taste lingered like summer in October.

Two more tomatoes hang glowing-orange in the garden, among their green sisters. I wait for them to drop into my open hand, deep-colored, tempting. (Long ago, the forbidden fruit of Eden was thought to be a tomato, the love-apple, the dusky-hued maiden with the poison hair. The serpent hardly needed to speak, so tempting was she.)