It was the day before the first hard freeze was expected in the fall of 1948 when Gram emptied her garden and introduced me to the growing power of stardust.  My Dad, an Army Air Corp pilot, was stationed in occupied Germany after World War II.  And, my Mom and I were living temporarily with her parents at the family farm, on the Red River north of Paris, Texas.  My world was filled with hard-working adults who lived by the natural rhythm of crop and livestock cycles.  They had little time to entertain an inquisitive four-year-old.  The only playmates I had were two cats and an ornery rooster who squawked and tried to peck me every time I ventured beyond the back door.  Gram realized how isolated I was and used her gardening skills to make my world brighter.

            “Kitchen tomatoes?”  My mind, primed by nightly fairy tales filled with magic brooms, pumpkins which became coaches and clocks that talked, envisioned vines snaking around the tin sink, over the water pump and across to the wood-burning cook stove in Gram’s comfortable turn-of-the-century kitchen!  I had dreadful visions of vines swallowing the cats and lassoing my hands as I fell asleep near the warm stove while watching bread bake, my usual Saturday afternoon practice.

            Gram, of course, had something else in mind.  She pushed tiny seeds into four pots full of garden dirt and placed them on the kitchen windowsill.  Then she tied back the curtains so the pots would receive plenty of light in the south-facing window.  By Thanksgiving, the kitchen tomatoes were 18 inches high and producing their first flowers.  It was my daily job to gently shake the tiny yellow blooms—“just like the bees do outside,” Gram explained, “and like the fairies do when they sprinkle stardust.”

            Before long, Christmas was upon us.  Gram and Mom filled the house with delicious aromas from the fruitcakes, stollen and cookies they baked.  Granddad and I went to a neighbor’s wood lot and cut down a bushy white pine that added more intoxicating fragrance to the house. We decorated the tree with oranges studded with cloves and rolled in freshly ground cinnamon and gingerbread boy cookies.  Granddad put five white paper stars I cut from shirt boxes amongst the pine boughs. And, we sprinkled silver glitter on the tree, because Gram said glitter attracted fairies.  I figured they would like our tree so much that they might leave a magical gift or two.  It worked!  One arrived on Christmas Eve from Germany.  It was an enormous parcel containing a porcelain doll with long, flaxen ringlets from Dad.  He sent chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, too, and an embroidered blouse for Mom.  We showed our exotic treasures to the steady stream of visitors who shared our holidays.  With all the festivities, the tomatoes faded from my mind…until the first snowfall on New Year’s Day brought me back to the kitchen window.

            “Gram,” I shouted, “it’s magic!  The plants grew ten feet overnight.  Fairies must have sprinkled stardust on them!”  I was a big fan of stardust, constantly pestering Gram and Mom to read a well-worn copy of Peter Pan to me.

            My grandmother chuckled.  “It could be them, now that you mention it.  Fairies love tomatoes almost as much as good boys and girls.  And, stardust would make the plants get big enough in a hurry to make tomatoes.”

            Five days went by.  I inspected the plants every hour to see if there were any tiny tomatoes.  My patience was nearly exhausted when I spied the first one.  More appeared every day, and I practiced counting by tallying the tomatoes every morning.  Afternoons were spent with Gram basking in the brightness of the window and warming our hands with hot cocoa while we admired the pale green fruits as they put on size.  She sat in her overstuffed chair, between the stove and window, read stories out loud from the Saturday Evening Post and told tales of when she was a girl. 

In the middle of January, seed catalogs that were more fascinating than Saturday Evening Post started arriving in the mail.  Brilliantly colored flowers and vegetables leaped off of every page.  Gram patiently explained that we could order seeds, the mailman would deliver them to our post box at the end of the road and when spring arrived we could plant the seeds in the garden.  I wanted to order everything!  Reminding me of our limited budget, Gram said I could pick one flower and one vegetable for the spring garden.  It was an impossible task.  I wanted everything.  Finally, I chose red and white candy-striped zinnias and yellow pear-shaped tomatoes.  I figured they would ripen faster than the sluggish ones that languished on our kitchen windowsill, because they didn’t have to turn red to be ripe.

            After Gram placed her seed orders, she suggested that I take a pair of scissors to the vivid pictures in the catalogs.  I carefully snipped sweet peas, delphinium, larkspur, carnations, marigolds and more.  Then, with a paste she concocted with flour and water, I glued my paper garden all over an old cigar box Granddad found in the cellar.  What a wonderful surprise it would make for Mom, I thought.  She recently found a job in Paris, 27 miles away and worked long hours, arriving home tired and glum every evening.  The colorful flower garden box would cheer her up, and she could keep the weekly letters from my Dad in it.  They were now in her top dresser drawer in a stack tied with a pale blue ribbon.  

            The kitchen tomatoes soon stretched my patience, as my focus turned back to the kitchen window.  They were turning red ever so S-L-O-W-L-Y.  There hadn’t been a tomato for dinner in over a month, and I loved them.  I desperately wanted a thick slice on a piece of homemade honey wheat bread slathered with butter made from our cow’s milk.  Couldn’t those fairies speed up the magical process?

            Finally, the day came when Gram picked the first ripe, red tomato.  The occasion coincided happily with Valentine’s Day, which is when I planned to give Mom the flower garden box.  That evening Gram and I presented Mom with a tray that held the tomato and my box when she arrived home from work.  “Oh, Mama,” she exclaimed, wiping tears from her eyes.  “Kitchen tomatoes!  And the most beautiful box in the world from my daughter,” she sobbed, patting my homemade present.  “They almost make me forget that Lou is still in Germany and how I miss him.”  I was upset that Mom was crying until Gram took me aside to explain that Mom’s tears were because we made her happy.

            We ate kitchen tomatoes at lunch and dinner for weeks.  Sometimes, there was only one ripe, but Gram sliced it thinly so everyone could have a bite. Meanwhile, she cleared space on the windowsill for six tiny pots of dirt in which she planted more tomato seeds.  They sprouted, grew rapidly and were set in the garden during the second week of April, along with the kitchen tomatoes, which kept on producing more juicy red globes.  Shortly after Gram’s outdoor tomatoes started ripening in June, my Dad returned from Germany.  His visit was short, and he went back to an Army base in El Paso to await release from the military.  Three months later, we were permanently reunited as a family and moved to Ft. Worth, where Dad had a job waiting as a test pilot for an aircraft company.

            Nearly every Christmas afterwards, for as long as my grandparents lived, we spent the holiday at the family farm.  The house always smelled heavenly from the cakes and cookies Gram baked.  And Granddad still cut down a fragrant pine we covered with clove-studded oranges rolled in cinnamon, gingerbread boys and silver glitter.  But, there were never tomatoes in the kitchen window again.  Mom said it was because Gram didn’t have a little girl to shake the flowers. 

            Today, the grandmother is me.  My sunny kitchen window is filled with tomato plants every winter, and I have a granddaughter—with her own visions of fairies—who loves to shake the flowers.  There’s one difference.  I plant tomato varieties like Silvery Fir Tree, Early Girl and Red Robin that ripen their fruit fast.  You see, I recall exactly how impatient a little girl can be, even when fairies spread stardust.
Copyright 2005 Doreen G. Howard.  Excerpted from My Mother's Garden (Penguin Books 2005).