What Is It About a Summer Tomato?

For Mother's Day: Following My Mother Into a Love for Summer Tomatoes

Last year’s garden boxes.

I grew up in a garden that contained, among many other things, long rows of tomatoes spilled over into the dirt, vines tangled and heavy with fruit. As soon as the green ripened into a deep red, they appeared everywhere. Often before dinner, my mother would send me or one of my siblings out to the garden to pick a tomato for the table. We'd clutch our find in hand, running back indoors where she’d slice it into thick slabs that dripped onto the plate and formed a thin pool to hold the whole.

Always we left at least one slice untouched at the end of the meal, and always my mother ate it. While we cleared the table and started the dishes, she’d reach for the plate and shake salt over the remains. Leaning back in her seat or against the countertop, she'd lose her gaze to the distance while she ate through the leftover tomatoes.

I was already old enough to like tomatoes but did so mostly as an accessory to something else, say a salad or a sandwich or a burger. My mother’s appetite for them was entirely different, singular. It leapt from her to take a near-perfect thing and swallow it down whole without pause or apology.

Clearing the dinner tomato plate, she appeared to me almost like a stranger, as if I were meeting her for the first time. Lost in the meditation of a routine act, she disappeared from our chatter and chaos into her hunger. Even as we clambered around her, she remained unmoved, transported somewhere we couldn’t follow or reach.

I did not know then that I was seeing her beyond her titles: no longer just a mother or a wife but solely and wholly a woman, completely unto herself and intensely individual. She appeared deeply beautiful to me then, and I admired her even as a long ache drew up in me to break the spell and return her to me as mother.

By my teenage years, I grew insatiable for summer tomatoes. As soon as the vines boasted ripe fruit, I lost myself to their song. Out to the garden I went again and again to find tomatoes raging red with thick, protective skin I peeled back carefully, juice dripping down my fingers and then my elbows. Inside, the tender fruit bruised more easily than a peak-season peach. Biting into those tomatoes was like biting into the sun, the story of dirt and rain and light gathered from the earth and spun into a single orb.

I was learning the outline of my appetite and how to meet it. For lunch, I chopped tomatoes together with garden cucumbers and onion and topped the mound with salt, lime juice, and cumin. I ate bowls and bowls of it. I drank tomato juice and slurped down plates of slices. I layered tomatoes on sandwiches and burgers and made giant bowls of garden salsa. By then, I’d spent summer after summer working alongside my mother to preserve the bounty, peeling and slicing, boiling and grinding tubs and tubs of tomatoes into countless quarts of salsa and sauce and juice to line the cellar shelves, garden gifts to last us the cold, long winter. We labored for hours, the cool basement our only reprieve during those high noon summer days. I fancied myself more like my mother, closer both to her appetite and knowledge of tomatoes but even in all my learning and eating, I had yet to touch the hem of her experience. I loved tomatoes but the transportation, the transformation visited upon my mother when she ate them eluded me.

Last summer, a faint hum of it appeared. Over a decade later, it was the first year I’d successfully grown tomato plants, an effort that began years earlier as a renter with only a few pots and limited space. Trial and error finally brought a small cherry tomato crop but last year, the first year in a home where I could plant into the earth, I finally picked a giant heirloom tomato from my own garden. I sliced and stacked it on a plate—just like my mother did all those years ago—salted the whole, and ate away at it until nothing remained.

Briefly, ever so briefly, that act fizzed something in me that felt akin to what I had imagined I had seen in my mother all those years ago.

So what is it about a summer tomato?

Perhaps it is not just the gift of its rich flavor and texture that arrives on the tongue almost like a sin but the love of a hand-grown thing rising to meet raw hunger that transforms upon contact.

Eating that tomato, still warm from the vine, I felt like my mother. I stood in my kitchen, leaning against the countertop just like she once did, plate of tomato in hand, watching out the window toward the small pocket of earth I coaxed into a harvest I now ate. Those sweaty, delirious days of childhood returned to me, and I went to them, transported just like I once imagined my mother being. I am young again, waking to find her outside, already among the rows, working to beat the rising sun and its promised heat. A fresh love for my mother floods me as I watch her, all of her, wondering still where she went and what all she became in those small, private moments of eating a tomato. Perhaps she, too, was thinking of the land that birthed her and the mother who tended both its soil and her into a blazing bounty.