Happiness is a tomato sandwich, I promise – InForum

WATFORD CITY, N.D. — I’ve been eating a tomato and cucumber sandwich almost every day for the past couple weeks.

This year, my tomato crop isn’t as prolific as past years, but they are tasty and there are plenty to choose from when I step outside my door and go hunting under big leaves and stems. I send my girls to do the same some days when I’m busy doing the dishes or making supper and realize they are so much like me — never truly prepared for the bounty, dozens of tomatoes of all sizes weighing down the bottom fold of their little shirts.

The garden will surprise you like that. One day it will be all stems and tiny blossoms and the next you go out to find that 47 giant cucumbers just magically appeared overnight.

What a thing it is to celebrate the end of the growing season by hunting for ripe things in the cooling down of a late summer evening. The perfectly weird-shaped carrot, the pearl white onions, the zucchini that is absolutely out of control. The picture-perfect tomato. It makes a woman feel like she’s accomplished something spectacular even if that spectacular thing was simply planting a seed.

If I’m being honest, this month the weeds have finally won the race to fall, but not enough to prevent those carrots from making themselves into the most perfect snack a kid could pack in their backpack on a Tuesday.

My little sister has been baking bread. I think I’ve told you this before. It’s a little magic trick she performs to ensure that she remains the favorite around here, and it’s working.

Lately, on the weekends she’ll bring over half of a fresh loaf (because her kids get first feast of course!) and we will toast it up and spread it with a mixture of mayo and sour cream (a trick I learned from a friend who makes the cutest little cucumber sandwiches on rye bread). And on that spread, we will layer thin slices of juicy red tomatoes, then the cucumber and then a healthy sprinkle of some fancy garlic pepper. If my husband’s involved, he will cook up some bacon to add to the mix, and no one on earth is going to stop him. But the veggies and the bread, they can stand on their own, which is something to say when bacon’s involved.

I’ll stand over my kitchen counter and eat that sandwich open-faced, so it’s really not a sandwich at all, and let the cucumbers and tomatoes sort of spill and juice back on my plate. I turn into some sort of human-shaped animal, devouring the whole creation in four hearty bites, no concern for napkins or social cues, because it’s too good and tomato season doesn’t last and the faster I eat this one, the faster I can eat another one.

Contributed / Jessie Veeder

My daughters have the same sentiment about the big Colorado peaches we pick up every other week from the farmers market. Peaches cut up and smothered in cream and a sprinkle of sugar will be a core memory of their childhood they’ll have tucked away to balance out the hard things. There are few things better in the world than a ripe peach, and our supply never lasts for canning or freezing. We make every effort to devour them fresh and then mourn the last lonely fruit in the fridge as the weather turns.

I drove by a rugged little house in a tucked-away neighborhood of our town this morning. Outside the door with a little tear in the screen and up against the slightly faded, slightly chipped siding sat a small but vibrant display of perfect pumpkins and fake plastic mums. It wasn’t a grand presentation of the change of season, the kind that costs hundreds of dollars and looks like a photo backdrop in Martha Stewart’s magazine. No, it wasn’t that.

But in that moment as the leaves were slowly changing on the trees and the morning light was hitting that humble house along the sidewalk just right, it shone out to me in my current state of “frazzled mother on her way to work after school drop-off” as an effort of gratitude for a new season— a chance to show on the outside what this person was feeling on the inside.

I pictured the resident of that house humming quietly to herself as she arranged it all, and I was glad she made the effort then, if not for my smile, but for hers.

When I say my prayers or make my wishes, I send up hope that my daughters have a happy life. But happy can become such an ambiguous word when you try to define it.

So I came here to tell you that we may have more control over it than we think.

I mean, have you ever eaten fresh baked bread with a tomato on top leaning over your kitchen counter with no regard for the mess it makes dribbling down your chin?

Contributed / Jessie Veeder

Have you ever picked a perfect pumpkin to place in your yard for no practical reason other than to have a perfect pumpkin in your yard?

Have you ever taken a bite of a fresh garden carrot with a little bit of dirt still on it?

Have you ever baked zucchini bread with your mother after she finally gave you the recipe?

Have you ever stopped to think that perhaps this is it?

This is what joy might look like on the outside of our skin: me and you eating peaches in cream for breakfast every day for as long as we possibly can because we can. Hallelujah. Amen.

---

READ MORE OF JESSIE’S COMING HOME COLUMNS

Greetings from the ranch in western North Dakota and thank you so much for reading. If you’re interested in more stories and reflections on rural living, its characters, heartbreaks, triumphs, absurdity and what it means to live, love and parent in the middle of nowhere, check out more of my Coming Home columns below. As always, I love to hear from you! Get in touch at [email protected].