a blog about tomatoes? aren't they a nightshade?

The meaning of the universe is 42, the placeholder answer offered up while the real one loaded.

Run the numbers on my own life, though, carry the one across four decades of unpaid backyard labor, and what prints is tomatoes. Solanum lycopersicum. A nightshade, technically, which is maybe the most on-brand thing I have ever been handed, given that I could not have designed a more darq-adjacent genus if you gave me a lab and a grudge. Best clade ever, or whatever. The family that gave us belladonna and the potata. Poison or dinner, off the taxonomic root.

know why a plant needs to be that dangerous in the ground? Two people fought over it for twenty years and I built the fortifications on both sides.

For the first tour I never enlisted. As a child I got conscripted into my mother's campaign, her triumphant turn as tomato queen, and my job was beds. Literal shit, shoveled by hand, into raised rows where her guaranteed Burpee stock would perform a platonic ideal of ripe fruit on schedule and 'as seen on the packet'.

Later, grown adult by turn, I switched forces. My father watched Gran's Amazon grow-boxes arrive in their cheerful cardboard, and he responded the only way his competitive nature knew. He drafted me again, this time to PVC and chicken wire, a structure engineered to win a contest with no possible prize, no judges and no armistice. He the madman and I his day laborer. Same posting, separate tours, different comandante.

What stays with me is neither the beds nor the war. The volunteers. Next season, in the gap between their actual efforts, tomatoes come up of their own from spent seed, ungovernable, off-brand mutants no one ordered and nobody could take credit for. I think about the plum trees, the ones that grew from seed we spat as kids (I no longer remember who nor where). More pit than plum, somehow. Sweeter than anything you'll find in any store.

That one had no winner. Life, uh, finds a way, in a yard where two people were losing the same fight.

No volunteer cares who was right.