Theresa Lewis

My father loved tomatoes, but he was not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination. When we went to the country for our summer holidays, if space would allow, my sister would plant a small vegetable garden and nurse it along all summer until harvest time in the fall.

As we entered our teens, we all had different schedules and some of us had jobs. It was no longer feasible for the whole family to go to the countryside for the summer. The year after I got married, my father retired. For some reason, he decided that he didn’t like the taste of store bought tomatoes. He said he wanted a small vegetable garden in the city where we lived. The problem was that we didn’t have the space to plant a regular sized vegetable garden.

My father didn’t want to let his idea fall flat so he went outside and looked around our back yard. He believed he had found the perfect spot to grow his tomatoes, if nothing else. Dad was great at delegating chores and the planting of his garden was no exception. One of my siblings planted a dozen tomato plants along the wall on the far side of the house. He started with seedlings that were about six inches tall. Every day, dad would go out to check on the progress of his garden. Every day, the plants looked just like they did the day before. If there had been any progress at all, it was only miniscule. The problem was that the plants were embedded on the shady side of the house.

Dad didn’t believe that it should matter where they were planted. They were in the earth and that plus a daily watering, in his mind, was all that was really needed. As the days then the weeks passed, there seemed to be no change. At first, we kind of shook our heads because we all felt that he wasn’t allowing enough time for the plants to grow. But, as more time passed, we were beginning to feel sorry for dad because he kept checking; almost willing the plants to show some signs of growth. He even prayed over the plants, yet there seemed to be no progress at all. Slowly, he stopped checking his garden as often.

There are times in life that you have to take matters into your own hands to get the desired results. My youngest brother felt so sorry for my dad that one day he went out and bought a basket of the biggest, reddest, most beautiful beefsteak tomatoes he could find and placed them all at the bottoms of the plants. That night when my dad went out to check on his tomatoes, he got the shock of his life. His face lit up like a child’s face on Christmas morning after seeing what goodies Santa had delivered.

We all thought it was quite a good trick that our brother pulled off. It worked. Dad finally got his tomatoes so he could once again enjoy his favourite tomato sandwiches. The tomatoes were so large that one slice was all that was needed to make a great sandwich.

Days later, dad said he knew that someone had put all those tomatoes there. He just shook his head and said, “…what some people have to go through just to get a tomato sandwich.”

The End