Tomato Pinatas

Monday was my first official "long" shift at the farm (6-11:15am). I've been working 6-9am through the summer, but now that the kids are in school and Matthew goes to preschool 3 mornings a week, I can play on the farm until preschool pickup.

My first day was a doozy, though. Hot. Muggy. And, dare I say it, a little boring. Not super fun.

Everything was fine until halfway through I was assigned to harvest field tomatoes. And most of the field tomato bits are perfectly reasonable! There's just one large patch that never got trellised. I crawled around in a forest of fallen tomato plants and knee-high weeds, searching for ripe tomatoes like some twisted Easter Egg Hunt. Every so often, I would grab a good-looking tomato, only to have my fingers plunk right into its squishy, rotten interior, spilling its stinky guts onto to the ground. It reminded me a little of a pinata. That made me smile.

More than once, good tomatoes would be gunked up by their rotten, maggotty neighbors. That wasn't fun. I'll still take that over giant spiders ANY day, though.

I was working with other people, but we didn't talk. I had podcasts and music on my phone, but I don't like using headphones/earbuds on the farm, and I didn't want to make other people listen to my stuff, so I kept it all off. Silent, hot, muggy, dirty work. Time dragged.

There was nothing anyone could do now to fix the trellising problem from 2 months ago. We just had to dig in and do it. So I did...in two different ways.

First, I thought about it as a person earning an hourly wage for my time: depression, drudgery, want to quit.

Then, I thought about it as if this were my farm, my produce, my personal project: resilience, grit, a deep breath, every good tomato found was a victory.

Even with a more positive mindset and an hourly wage nudging me along to the end of my shift, I was happy to leave it there for others to finish at 11:15.

It troubled me that my morning at the farm wasn't very fun. I thought about it throughout the day. And I even had a dream about it that night: My boss told me that the farm wasn't doing very well and they were going to stop paying me. He thought it wouldn't matter as much to me because I had initially turned down the wage offer. In my dream, I was horrified. There were brief moments in that tomato-picking ordeal that my wage was the only thing keeping me there. I didn't like that feeling. I was glad to wake up and realize that the wage would remain in place and I could continue working at the farm in a variety of jobs. I even sent that email to my boss about taking on more trellising work next year. We'll see what comes of it. In the meantime I might just have to develop a sudden allergy to tomato plants...