Jersey Tomatoes
I learned the way herbs smell before I learned how to read or spell their names.
To this day, basil in the rain, immediately transports me to New Jersey and my childhood.
My grandparents lived up the street and around the block, I can still get there in my dreams.
Anytime I was over they would send me to the back garden for basil, parsley, thyme and a “nice” basket of tomatoes for the gravy.
Gravy not sauce.
One half of my German, Polish & Italian blend of ancestral inheritance decided that before I was born.
The other hotly contested it.
Everything was nice, by the way.
Charissa, do you want a nice juice to drink?
A nice Little Debbie cake?
A nice piece of Italian bread?
I learned a lot.
None of technical, all of it practical.
It took me till my mid-thirties to realize all those things were notes, notes in a love song sung over me.
I’m far from my childhood home now, in a place that, based on hours studying ancestry, is brand-new to my bloodline.
We’ve been many things but never New Mexican.
Yet, there are tomatoes here too.
Different ones, grown in different soil, different flavors and colors than I always know what to do with and yet, sauce is sauce.
Rather, gravy is gravy.
I collected these from two different gardens, one is mine, one I’m tending for a friend this week.
It’s an early pajama day due to sheer weariness.
Yet, there are tomatoes.
My hands move on auto-pilot.
I don’t know any of the cooking terms for what I’m doing but I know the texture it should be by sight, smell and, most of all, flavor.
This one’s for you John & Pauline.
A nice gravy for dinner.
Love Notes (From October 2015 and the last time I saw my grandparents alive) Travel whims are strikable like lightning, boltable, flaming blue on a gold, October day as I drive, alone –except for sleeping children – up the cold, east coast. Even now my grandmother’s hands, knuckles knotted, slice tomatoes for the gravy and my grandfather plucks the last clinging, basil leaves from his faltering plants, love notes these, sung softly, quaveringly, sacredly.