The Pear Tomatoes that Took Over the Thunderbird Trailer Park

So when I was five and a half my mom died. (That is a whole other series of posts so I won't go into that now, but really I will get to it. Eventually.) What is important for THIS post is that when my mom died, my older sister and I went to live with my maternal grandparents in Farmington, NM. What is also important is that we, my sister and I, were pretty devastated by our mother's passing and neither of us was very outgoing or interested in much.

Farmington was a typical little city in the early seventies. Kids could roam where they would and it was fairly safe. We lived in a nice trailer park and I know it was nice because there was a trashy one behind us and ours didn't look like that at all. We had sweet little yards inside three foot chain link fences, well kept sidewalks, old willow trees and speed bumps. There weren't a ton of kids in the park owing to the fact that is was probably 75% populated by old people (by that I mean people in their fifties. Oh how perspective changes things.) Anyway, it was a nice place to be, even though I was pretty much catatonic from the fallout from losing my mom.

But I digress, this is supposed to be about tomatoes.

So, one day in what I seem to remember as the depths of winter, though Farmington is hardly Alaska or even Maine, I was walking down the frozen tundra of a street and lo and behold I found a frozen pear tomato. Okay, I have no effing clue what that tomato was doing in the street in January or February of 1974, but there it was. Being the inquisitive and highly annoying 6 year old I was, I picked it up and took it home to my grandmother. (Now my grandma was about the most amazing plant grower I have ever seen. Really, I am totally not kidding here people, she looked at stuff and it turned green. Really, she had over 200 African Violets while I was growing up. AMAZING.) So I took the frozen pear tomato home and told Grandma in no uncertain terms I wanted to do an experiment and could she help. She pulled out a snackpack can (yes, she saved snackpack cans.) I went out to the yard and scraped some topsoil up and put it in the snackpack can. I then squished up the whole now less frozen tomato and stirred it into the topsoil in the snackpack can. I added just enough water that it was thick and gooey, kinda like the pudding that came in the snackpack can and stirred some more. Then we put it in a window and I watered it every couple of days.
Fast forward a month, and it is late February or early March and suddenly I have a bazillion seedlings, which my grandmother, God love her, helped me put in cardboard milk cartons cut in half. (Yes, she had saved several just for this purpose - Remarkable what growing up in the Great Depression will do for you.) Another month goes by and it is late March or early April and we now have HUNDREDS of seedlings in cardboard milk cartons, which we now can put in the yard alongside one of the chain link fences where she didn't have any other flowers.

By June of '74 my little tomato experiment had turned into "the summer the pear tomatoes took over the Thunderbird Trailer Park," and my love of tomatoes has never waned. I wish I could find the picture of my 6 year old self just about to bite into the pear tomato, but alas, it is MIA at the moment.

Just know that I was an adorable blonde headed, pigtailed little girl whose life had been completely turned upsidedown by the death of her mom and whose luck at finding the frozen pear tomato gave her something to do in the dark of winter when nothing seemed possible or likely to live.

The unlikely tale of "the Pear Tomatoes which took over the Thunderbird Trailer Park" has fueled my love of tomatoes to this day, which is why I spent most of my day yesterday cutting up and cooking down gallons of tomatoes which I will can as sauce today.