WORDS • IDEAS: ELODIE BARNES
Tomato Seeds by Elodie Barnes
The air smells of raw earth and daffodils, and Elena is watching her mother fall in love. It’s a strange sight. Elena’s mother is seventy and can’t usually remember her own name. She certainly can’t remember Elena’s. Her brain fell quickly, one day fighting and the next collapsed, spent, surrendered. She doesn’t remember when she’s eaten. She doesn’t know where she is although she mostly seems to be happy there. But the man has a shuffling walk and a kindly face that seems to attract her, and the staff have said that she remembers a name for him even if she remembers something different each time. Elena wonders if the man knows how lucky he is. At least he is not a void, a blank where a person should be. She is watching them from across the garden. He is potting seeds outside a greenhouse, built for the residents to use, one of the many activities that the nursing home advertises to keep minds occupied and bodies active. Elena knows the seeds are tomatoes. Almost impossible to kill. Come the summer they’ll have a glut of them, and they’ll be giving them away to families who visit because half of the residents can’t stand them. But the man either doesn’t know this, or did know but has forgotten, or does know and doesn’t care, because he’s laying them in, one seed after another, tenderly covering them with compost as if he was putting a child to bed. Elena’s mother is standing beside him, her small body wrapped in a shawl and her eyes watching everything. His lips are moving. He’s telling her, over and over again, one pot after another, what he’s doing. Elena knows that her mother will still have forgotten by the time he’s reached the end of the row of pots, but she feels a wave of gratitude towards the man anyway. He has the kind of patience her mother needs.
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