Then the beans did it. Then the eggplant.
It was not blight and it was not aphids and I have grown vegetables in that yard for eleven years and I have seen blight and I have seen aphids.
I took photographs for four days. Then I drove a soil sample and a plant sample out to Trellis Lab in Weald County and paid a hundred and eleven dollars for a screen I had to look up how to ask for.
The result came back eight days later.
Persistent broadleaf herbicide. In the soil. In the compost. In the leaf tissue.
The kind that does not break down. The kind that survives being cut, dried, composted, and turned, and is still in there a year later killing anything with a broad leaf.
My entire vegetable garden was gone.
Including a tomato my father kept alive for forty-four seasons.
PART 2 — FORTY-FOUR SEASONS
My father was Walther Ackroyd and he was a die setter at a press shop for thirty-one years and he grew tomatoes.
Not as a hobby, exactly, although it looked like one from outside. He grew one particular tomato.
In 1981 a man he worked with called Ossian Petrakis gave him a handful of seed out of an envelope, from a plant his own mother had brought over in 1956, and my father put them in the ground behind a rented house on Nadeau Street and never stopped.
Every single year after that, from 1981 to 2019, he saved seed.
If you have never done it, saving tomato seed is not complicated and it is not quick. You choose your plants during the season — not the biggest fruit, the best plant, which is a different thing and takes years to learn to see. You take fruit off those specific plants. You squeeze the seed and the gel into a jar with a little water and you leave it on a windowsill for three or four days until it ferments and grows a lid of mould, because the gel has a germination inhibitor on it and the fermentation is what takes it off.
Then you wash it, and you dry it on a plate, and you put it in a paper envelope with the year on it in pencil.
Forty-four times.
That is what forty-four seasons is. It is not forty-four packets of seed. It is forty-four years of one man choosing which plants got to continue, in one yard, in one soil, in one climate, which is the reason that tomato did well here and had stopped doing particularly well anywhere else.
He gave it away constantly. That is the part that matters later.
He wrote Petrakis 1956 on every envelope he ever handed anybody, for thirty-eight years, because Ossian Petrakis died in 1994 and my father was not going to have his name come off it.
He took me through the fermentation when I was nine. I have a memory of a jar of tomato slurry on a windowsill in August and my father telling me not to touch it and my mother being extremely unhappy about the smell.
He died in the February of 2019.
I want to say how, because it matters to the rest of it. He had a stroke in the November of 2018 and he was in a bed at home for fourteen weeks and he could not talk properly for any of them.
