From the car’s passenger seat, I watch grain fields pass like a movie reel. I’m fascinated by the ocean of corn, silver-gray tassels like foam, and the velvet drapes of emerald soybeans undulating over the soft swells of the Mississippi River bottom. My boyfriend, Bill, and I are driving home to Texas, leaving the embrace of the Midwest, where a rainstorm blew through last evening on the shoulders of a mild norther, dropping early September temperatures to something that feels almost cool.
For the past few days, we’ve been visiting the small Illinois town where Bill grew up and where his 95-year-old mother, Alberta, and his two older brothers live. Theirs is a rural community where people live close to the earth. Even if your day job is working at the correctional facility on the outskirts of town, at the community hospital, or coaching high school basketball, you likely have a plot for growing beans, corn, and tomatoes. If you’re fortunate enough to have a few acres, you probably have some apple or peach trees, too.
Last Saturday, the first full day of our visit, Bill and I drove the backroads outside of town, stopping at every vegetable stand we could find, searching for homegrown tomatoes. You’ll never see anyone tending these small roadside stands, just a mayonnaise jar sitting atop a whiskey barrel or an old picnic table. A handwritten sign on the jar lists the prices for the tomatoes, squash, and beans piled in old plastic flowerpots or brown paper sacks. There’s always a wad of cash in the jar, so it’s easy to make change if you need to, but I prefer to round up, leaving a ten-dollar bill for $9.00 worth of vegetables. Evidence, I hope, to the farmer and his wife that their faith in humanity is well-founded.
Early the following Monday, Alberta, Bill and I huddled around Alberta’s kitchen table, watching a YouTube video about canning tomatoes without a pressure cooker. The instructor is a husky, clean-cut man named Jamie. He gingerly drops tomatoes into a pot of boiling water to loosen the skins. “Now that water will get dirty because these tomatoes come from the outside. Don’t worry about that,” he said in a lazy drawl as he carefully retrieved the first batch and dropped more tomatoes into the same pot of boiling water.
“I haven’t canned anything since I was a girl,” Alberta confided. That’s more years than most people’s entire lifetimes. I wondered what she remembered of canning with her mother many decades ago, and for a moment, I considered asking Alberta that question. But doing so would have prompted a prolonged, rambling story. I love Alberta’s stories, but we had sixty pounds of tomatoes to can that morning. I reserved my question for later.
In Alberta’s tiny kitchen, we established an assembly line. Bill boiled tomatoes until the skins wrinkled, then moved them to a colander. Once cool enough to handle, Alberta peeled the tomatoes with a small paring knife; it didn’t take much coaxing, and the skins dropped into the sink like damp, fallen leaves. I cut the peeled tomatoes into juicy chunks and transferred them to a large pot we brought to a gentle simmer. While I held a funnel, Bill carefully poured the cooked tomatoes into jars we’d sanitized in the dishwater and heated in the oven. Sealing the jars tightly, we turned each one upside down and set a five-minute timer. Jamie had promised this would create a vacuum and ensure our tomatoes stayed fresh through the winter. The prospect of having homegrown tomatoes year-round is what prompted us to embark on this undertaking in the first place.
When the last of our jars had been filled and sealed, and we’d washed pots and wiped down Alberta’s sink and stovetop, we high-fived one another. I photographed the kitchen table, now covered with heavy glass jars, full of glistening, dusky red tomatoes, Alberta’s flowered tablecloth barely peeking through.
As we drive through the Mississippi River Bottom along Illinois Route 3, I watch for signs for Murphysboro, Red Bud, and Chester – clones of the tiny town where we’ve spent the past several days. Except that the town we left hours ago is Bill’s childhood home, which has also become a second home to me. I’ve come to love the simplicity of life there, which is so different from my busy, harried life in the city, and the easy friendliness of its people. I love the routine – bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches in Alberta’s kitchen on Saturday afternoons and church on Sunday mornings, the littlest kids collecting loose change in empty soup cans from the twenty-something adults in the pews for their “noisy offering.” The lazy evenings we spend watching Illinois football in Bill’s brother Mark’s basement, curled in an oversized blanket, eating sliced homegrown tomatoes topped with Miracle Whip is an indulgence far removed from my world of deadlines and performance goals.
I’m always surprised when someone recognizes Bill at the local market or the gas station. Yes, he visits a couple of times yearly, but he hasn’t lived in this town since leaving for college almost fifty years ago. In some ways, life here seems suspended in time. And after five years of visiting, it’s sometimes difficult to separate my experiences from the stories Bill had told me.
I think about the vegetable stands where we bought our tomatoes last Saturday. I’d known about them long before visiting this town of thirty-two hundred people. My vivid mental pictures of life there had grown out of Bill’s stories of him and his friends swimming in the clear, deep water of retired mine pits just outside of town, of the KC Hall, where men gather over beers to debate local politics and solve the world’s problems, and the annual Mardi Gras parade that rolls down Main street each October, led by the elementary school kids decked in their Halloween costumes. But Bill’s stories of the vegetable stands spoke to me the most, telling me about the character of this town and the people who breathe life into it, a community that assumes the best of others.
Once we’re back in Texas, we’ll give jars of tomatoes to our friends and neighbors, boasting about our accomplishment, regaling every step of the canning process in detail, and telling everyone, as we always do, that there are no better tomatoes than Midwest tomatoes. We’ll tell them about the vegetable stands, too, a story some have heard before but worth the retelling—proof that despite all the divisiveness and distrust flooding the news, there’s still plenty of goodness in this world.
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(Photo: ep_jhu/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- The Honor Gardens by Linda K. Allison - October 24, 2024