When we moved to Kentucky from Louisiana, when I was ten years old, one of the first things Daddy did was plant a little vegetable garden in the lower forty.

The “lower forty” is what we call the back end of the yard, forty doesn’t have any real numerical value that I can tell. In Louisiana we never had a garden or a lower forty. The land wasn’t meant for growing vegetables. It wasn’t really meant to be land. Our home rested on the delta of the Mississippi. Orange trees and marsh grass and cypress trees and great oaks grew, but that’s about it. The land was soggy, the sun unrelenting. 

My little sisters and I picked pecans that fell from the giant oak in the front yard. We stole oranges from the grove behind our house. We picked blackberries that grew along the levy. But mostly we fished. We went out in Daddy’s fishing boat, dropping nets or pulling them in. We went trawling or maybe pole fishing, just for fun. Instead of a garden, our yard had fishing nets and boats and Daddy’s tall white fishing boots and sometimes the animals themselves: redfish, gar, crabs, crawfish, shrimp, catfish. 

Daddy’s childhood wasn’t spent on marshland. He had memories of gardens with rows and rows of vegetables in Arkansas. As soon as he could after we moved to Kentucky, he had the tiller in the ground, the fresh soil churning beneath him. For the rest of my childhood, we would always have a vegetable garden. 

My sisters and I traded helping Daddy clean out his boat for weeding the rows of tomato plants. We traded sifting through the trawling board, looking for soft shell crabs and shrimp, for picking okra and shucking corn. We traded the salty gulf waters for the bitter soil in the lower forty. 

Of all the things we planted, I liked the tomatoes the best. The progress was easiest to see. The green stalks hugged the wooden stakes Daddy hammered into the ground. Every few days he would check on his ties and adjust the knots. Then we would watch for the little green bulbs bursting out from the stalks. It would happen quickly. And they would grow and change color daily. Progress. Immediate payoff for our work. 

The best payoff was the tomato themselves. On a warm afternoon picking tomatoes with Daddy, our buckets nearing full, I complained, “Daddy, I’m getting hungry.”

“Well, eat you one of them ’maters.” 

I watched him do it first. He picked one up, wiped it on his jeans, rubbed it in his hands. Then bit into it. “OooWeee. It’s good.”

When I bit into my own red tomato, its skin tender and thin, the juices ran down my chin, warm. This did not taste like the slices on burgers or the chunks in salads or dices on tacos. There was an almost-sweetness in the warmth, a delicacy in the melt-in-my-mouth. 

Daddy punched the top of my arm, smiled widely as I wiped away the tomato juices still running down my chin. “Yep. That’s a good ‘mater, itn’t? We did good,” he said. I squinted up at my daddy, the sun in my eyes. 

About five years later I would do the same thing with my brand new boyfriend, Sam. His first time at my house, this one a few miles from the first one we lived in in Kentucky. Our garden was no longer in the lower forty. It was now acres big and included everything from squash to pumpkins.

During our walk, I picked tomatoes for Sam’s mom, something he thought was strange; I just saw it as polite. When I brushed a tomato off on my jeans and bit into it, he thought it even more strange; I just loved the taste of a tomato right off the vine, the sun soaked deep into its skin. We went back up to the house and I fried up some green tomatoes. It was several years before Sam admitted to me that he didn’t care for tomatoes so much. 

We still live in Kentucky. All of us. None of us have moved back to the marshlands of Louisiana. Thirty years later. My sisters both grow their own tomato plants. We don’t miss the salty Gulf waters so much anymore. We don’t long for it like we did before. This land in Kentucky has so much to offer, as much as oceans and oceans and oceans. 

I don’t have a garden. Not even a single tomato plant. But Daddy’s lessons aren’t wasted. All those years of working in the family garden, all those days of him trying to teach me how to plant and harvest and keep the pests away, none of it is wasted.

When we worked outside, I loved when Daddy talked. There was always some lesson, even in the humor. I liked listening to his stories.  “Now let me tell you girls what happened the time I…” it might begin. Or “The Old Man and I, one time we got ourselves in a bind…” I loved those stories. The Old Man was his dad, my Papaw Carl. Daddy’s childhood was filled with adventure and mischief. I listened in wonder. Each story made this man feel more like a superhero. And each story made me feel closer to him. 

Out in the garden, my Daddy was doing something far more important than tending to his tomato plants or checking on his okra or picking corn. I just didn’t see it then. But he knew it all along. As my sisters and I walked alongside him, picking weeds, dropping stakes, and eating tomatoes, our Daddy was tending to his most important harvest. 

It was never about tomatoes.