The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

Let me back up and tell you about the garden first, so you understand what she actually took. It was never only vegetables.

Gene and I got married when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-three, and we bought the house on Sumac Street the next spring because it had that long back lot, deeper than anybody else’s on the street, running all the way back to the county drainage easement and the walnut trees. The people who had it before us kept horses back there. Gene stood in that weedy lot the first day we walked it and told me he was going to feed our whole family off that ground, and I laughed at him, because Gene worked at the feed mill and did not know the first thing about growing anything. He learned. He read every book the little library had. He drove forty minutes to the extension office and pestered the man there until they were friends. He killed a lot of plants those first years. But by the time our kids were in grade school, that garden fed us all summer, put up jars that lasted us all winter, and gave away more than we kept.

The tomatoes were his pride. Somewhere around our fifteenth year, Gene started saving seed off the best plants, the ones that made the sweetest fruit, the ones that held up in our hard clay and our dry Augusts. He crossed them and saved and crossed again, keeping notes in a spiral notebook in his own square handwriting, and after about eight years of that he had a tomato that was his. Deep pink, almost rose colored, big as a softball, shaped a little like a heart with a point at the bottom, and so sweet the grandkids ate them like apples with the juice running down their arms. He named it after me. Glenda’s Girl, he wrote on the seed envelopes. He thought it was the funniest, sweetest thing, handing me a tomato and saying, here you go, here is my Glenda’s Girl.

He entered them at the Marion County Fair every August for nineteen years. He won the ribbon most of those years. There is a whole generation of people in this town who grew up knowing that Gene Prewitt’s Glenda’s Girl tomatoes were the best thing on the fairgrounds, and a lot of them had starts of it in their own gardens, because Gene gave the seed away to anybody who asked. He never sold it. He said a good tomato was not something you kept to yourself.

That is what Tammy stripped out of my yard eleven days after the funeral. Two acres, but really that one center row, the row that was Gene’s whole self poured into the dirt. The row that carried the only living thing left in the world with my name on it.