Tomatoes and Provident Living

"Where are they coming from?" She Screamed. The window was black, covered with buzzing flies. She’d seen plenty of flies in her day, including big ones like this that she and her brother’s called meat flies growing up, large and much slower than their smaller cousins, but knew she’d never seen anything like this before!

Cathy had been canning stewed tomatoes and cranking the metal handle of the juicer all morning and now into the afternoon too as the block-long rows of tomatoes were all coming on at once. She’d saved two ten gallon buckets and a pile of Anaheim’s and jalapeno’s for a run of salsa tomorrow, but now her wrists hurt, fingers were water-logged and she felt her gumption to get so much done was waning.

Plus, she knew tomorrow she’d add to her pains having to wear the pair of swimming goggles she’d also set out in order to prevent her eyes burning out, and knew too at her age the suctioning action could put raccoon rings around her eyeballs for the following three days!

“Don’t open that door,” she shouted at her adult son as he approached his hand already on the knob. She saw him simultaneously pull his head back from the buzzing frenzy of flies that were now a disturbed cloud as his own eyes registered.

“What the hell are these,” he shouted before cursing some more.

Her five year old grandson dragging a bouncing yo-yo behind him on the sidewalk stopped watching his toy and skipped up the steps to find out what all the fuss was about.

“Whoa! What are all those flies trying to bug you for, Grandma”?

“Really, I don’t know unless they’re some new killer strain of ketchup flies who ran out of stuff to eat at the Del Monte factory!” she teased.

“Can I have them?” he begged.

She instructed son and his son to meet her at the back door, where the trailing yellow roses and the ancient black walnut were casting shadows across the flimsy, wooden, screened door they rarely used that opened to her dining room. There, she pulled her son and then grandson in quickly, only letting seven or so flies buzz in before securing the hook and eye latch.

Son and mother laughed about the Mormon crickets and stories in Revelations about bottomless pits, scorpions and locusts. Could be these hot temperatures were bringing about the last days sooner than hoped. At least she’d have preserved some food for her loved ones if times got bad.

Her grandson stared at the flies in the front window and tugged at her shirt,
“Please, grandma, I want them! I can feed them to Harold!” Harold was Ethan’s leopard gecko.

She gave him one of the washed and drying canning jars, one of the few wide mouths she mostly used for peaches with a lid and ring and these instructions:

"You need to count them. All of them!! Best to hide them behind the house and you can take them home from there.”

Ethan spent the rest of the afternoon scooping and pinching and guiding with a small goldfish net as many flies as he could into his jar—some getting away as he opened and slapped the lid, turned the gold ring, but for the most part he was catching a pretty good amount for his mere five years. She swelled a bit with pride thinking her grandson had much more tenacity and focus than most of the other little kids in her Sunday school class who seemed unable to focus more than a minute.

After coming in briefly for lunch, he’d taken a gob of Alpo wet from Wanda’s bowl in the kitchen and added it to the jar saying it’d keep the flies occupied on the bottom and not flying away.

That afternoon he left with an almost black bottle of flies for his Harold. She really hoped his mother wouldn’t be too mad.

Next morning she woke to crystals on the lawn, fairy dust of late fall, both magical and disturbing. How could this be? She was sure glad she’d picked most of the tomatoes and this would be the first time in history that she’d canned salsa in a sweater. She saw many of the flies had gone and those remaining were very slow, like the wasps that wake from frozen logs brought in from the stack and set by the fire in February.

She found she was running short on lids and needed to jet down to the IGA and hopefully they still had some in stock so she didn’t have to drive all the way into Spanish Fork, especially after canning two days and in her sweats and ratty sweater. She was wearing clogs she kept by the door with no socks and couldn’t believe when she got in her Honda that frost covered the windshield! She dug around a stack of maps and Kotex in her glove box and finally found her free, gas station scraper.

Second Timothy, “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come,” she repeated to herself, in small puffs of breath as the abraded white added a burn to her already reddened and dried hands.

Her testimony of provident living growing in her bosom as she slowly took the icy curves.

An @mariannewest, weekend, three prompts freewrite:
Photo Credit: Jordan Madrid/unsplash