57/365 But it's not all wine and roses (history)

While I eventually came to an understanding with Joey, it wasn't that we were bestest best friends. The second autumn of the garden came along and we as a school harvested a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grew an heirloom variety of indeterminate vines and I didn't stake or cage them. Not that I hadn't intended, but my personal life kind of fell apart over the summer when I miscarried and it took a while to bounce back. In that bounce back, I had cake and coffee at Joey's house so she could tell me how sorry she was to hear I'd miscarried. She'd been trying for a while and had resorted to IVF, which had failed several times.

"I can't imagine what it would be like to get pregnant and then lose the baby," she said, and I think she meant it. I ate cake and tried not to think too much about it. I would be pregnant in October but here it was August and it was all still so bad.

But the summer drew to a close and school started up. We donated tomatoes to the food pantry. We let kids take them home. I had brief visions of the future, using produce from the garden in school lunches--nowadays this is the hip education thing to do. Back then though it seemed revolutionary.

So I walked out of school one afternoon and went around to the garden to tend things.

The school raised bed had been replaced with something from an alternate universe. The tomatoes were gone. In their place were impatiens, mums, and pansies. It must have taken someone all day to do this and yet nobody came to tell me? I stood there staring at the damned little flowers and got really angry.

I went inside to Sr. Fern. "What happened to the tomatoes? We were still harvesting--it's only late September."

"Oh," she faked surprise. "Joey told me you said it was done. There's a donor coming to look at the school this evening and she wanted it to look nice. It's only tomatoes," she said as an apology.

"Right," I snapped back. I picked up my canvas bag with the last of the tomatoes alongside my grade book and lesson plans and walked out. Coming out onto the parking lot, there was Fr. Bill walking up to go into the school.

"Why did Joey get to tear out the school garden and plant flowers?" I spit out at him. "Flowers?"

"She said the growing season was over," he repeats the same excuse. "I think some people complained that it looked messy."

"It's fall," I waved my arms the air. "Part of gardening with kids is letting things get a little messy. Plants die. But they weren't even dead!"

"Well," but he stops, for the first time in my experience, with nothing to say or to calm me down with.

"Just because she's good with ONE THING," I yell at him, pounding my fist in the air as if I were hitting a table. "It doesn't make her an expert on everything!"

He doesn't reply. I walk away from him there, not caring who saw me--dismissal time, of course, is filled with people. I get in my car just as I see her pulling up in her SUV. I don't wave back.

She comes up to my room the next day. "Hey," she interrupts class.

"Hi, Joey, I can talk to you in a minute."

"No, I just wanted to drop this off for you." I walk over to the door and she hands me a huge basket of tomatoes. A huge basket. Like, feed a family of 4 for a week kind of huge basket of tomatoes. I take it with both hands.

"I should have talked to you first," she apologizes. I nod, but I'm over being angry. "In other news," she continues more brightly, "we got a grant."

"That's great," I smile thinly. "Thanks for the tomatoes."

I take them home. There isn't a single conflict between us from then on.