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LIAM
No one tells you what kind of toll physical labor will take on a thirty-two-year-old body until your back and arms are so stiff they feel like they might snap off if you move the wrong way.
Well, I guess they do; I mean, aging is an obvious fact of life, but egotistical pricks like me who think they know everything there is to know about doing a job that requires such heavy lifting just don’t listen. Or maybe we refuse to admit that our bodies are no longer the hulking twenty-something masses with the abilities they once had.
Either way, I’m in a world of pain as I hobble my ass down the main drag of my small town.
Hope Crest is quiet at this hour of the morning on a Sunday, the sun just peeking over the tops of the buildings on Newton Street. Red bricks make up the blocks of shops that sit on the banks of the Delaware River, the water calm and serene before the summer tourists chop it up with their kayaks and inner tubes.
This small, charming Pennsylvania town has been my home since I was born, and I wouldn’t leave it for all the money in the world. Not that money is a motivating factor for me. If someone offered me season tickets to the professional football team in Philly for the rest of my life and a farm of fifty acres plus, I might be inclined to jump when they said how high. But otherwise, I’m staying put in my comfortable little slice of paradise in this East Coast river valley.
The scent of morning dew and baking pastries is enough to get me in the car this morning, knowing a good stretch and use of my muscles might shake some of the pain. And if that doesn’t help, there are always the sticky buns from Vanilla Bean, the boutique coffee shop in town. Brenda, the owner, has been here for twenty years and often keeps a few of my favorite types of pastry in the back for me.
Yesterday was sucker picking day out in the fields I hone, and while picking unneeded branches off tomato plants so they don’t drain the other stems of nutrients may seem like a monotonous, easy job, it’s not exactly kind on the muscles. Bending at the waist and wrestling a lot of stubborn plants to whip them into shape has left me sucking in a lungful of gasped air each time my tailbone twists the wrong way. I figured trying to walk it off was a stupid decision, but then again, lying in bed last night didn’t help at all, and I’ll do just about anything to stop the throbbing.
My mother, bless her caring heart, has told me to go to the doctor about three hundred times at this point. Not that I’ve listened. Being the oldest son in a family of very close-knit, traditional, hometown royalty sort of folks, I have to assume my role proudly as the grumpy, know-it-all who loathes showing vulnerability both emotionally and physically.
That’s how anyone who comes in contact with Hope Crest’s resident vegetable farmer knows me to be. I can’t disappoint them now.
The original Asher family farm was about four acres, with another acre designated for the large white colonial my grandparents and now my parents have occupied for decades. We used to grow about fifteen thousand tomato plants a year, which yielded about a hundred tomatoes per plant. For three generations, my family has been out working the fields, harvesting our tomatoes and other vegetables to make the homemade sauce for our pizzeria, Hope Pizza. We cultivate three types of tomatoes, garlic, onions, peppers, and herbs, from seedlings to fully-grown yields, and then can the ingredients to make our award-winning restaurant’s special sauce.
My grandfather taught me how to till the soil, handle the delicate first sprouts, and use the water wheel transplanter to transport our plants into the fields. He educated me on growing times, seasons, farm equipment, greenhouse growing, picking, watering, and everything in between. Our family farm was his brainchild, and I was his apprentice from around the time I could remember my first memory.
I grew up between those rows of vegetables with dirt on my hands, boots on my feet, and the scent of it all swirling around me. The farm is where I feel most alive, most like me, and though it might be strange to some—including my family at times—I much prefer my solitude to the grind of the restaurant. Even while I do spend most nights there, it’s only in the kitchen helping out and never customer-facing.
When I decided not to continue my college education because school and I never exactly meshed, I knew there was only one thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be out in the sun, the brim of my straw hat shielding my eyes from the rays, as I worked on bringing our food to fruition. I wanted to work with my hands and get lost in my thoughts as I went row by row, collecting ripe fruit and vegetables to turn into the delicious meals Hope Pizza would put out.
With a little protest from my parents, who wanted me to stay in school even if it was for a degree in some sort of agricultural study, I left my university and began rising with the sun and my grandfather each day.
We all ended up back in the family business, my two brothers, sister, and I. Almost everyone in our family worked with or for the restaurant tangentially. It’s the nest we all flew from and landed back in years later when we were ready to settle down. For me, it just came earlier than the others.
The two years I got with my grandfather in the fields, just us two working like dogs and happy as pigs in shit, were some of the best of my life. Losing him to cancer so swiftly and brutally that I had to watch him vomit multiple times a day until he died four weeks later was the worst.
Ever since, it’s felt like I’ve been wandering around with a storm cloud over my head, like I’m some grumpy cartoon character. My siblings equate me to the lovable but depressed donkey from Winnie the Pooh. While I love my job and the place where I live, the people I cared for and lost have left gaping holes in their absence, mostly inside my heart.
But I brush that off, like I always do, because there is nothing I can do about it. They aren’t coming back, and even if they could, I’m too pissed off about being abandoned to dole out second chances.
Passing Hope Pizza with its red and white checkered overhang, gold lettering on the doors, and currently dark windows, a sense of nostalgia washes over me. Our family exists in this building as much as they do in the living room of my parent’s home. No matter what I’m doing on Newton Street, I can feel a sense of calm when my gaze swings this way.
These days, though, that comfort comes with a twinge of anxiety.
With the purchase of my brother Patrick’s wife’s land, we added four more acres to our original plot and my heavy schedule and responsibilities have increased exponentially. In the generations before me, my great-grandfather and grandfather managed to get by with only one or two other seasonal workers during a harvest period. Now, I must employ about six or seven farmhands, depending on the time of year. Not only did we add three more acres of tomatoes, but we started producing vegetables at my brother Evan’s request.
He’s the head chef of the restaurant now that our father is trying to hand over the reins, and Evan’s fancy culinary expertise means dishes with all kinds of specialty vegetables. Different types of eggplant, zucchini, peppers, cabbage, carrots, you name it, and in the last year, my little brother pestered me to grow it for him. I can’t deny it’s making a difference though; Evan has introduced staple menu items and dishes in his time as head of the kitchen that our customers and tourists rave about.
But the number of plants and labor it takes is too much for just a single person with an assistant anymore, and that’s without my foray into the commercial sauce production. After my grandfather’s death, I was lost for a good couple of years. My mother suggested I begin a new venture to take my mind off it, and thus Hope Sauce was born. Five years ago, my father and I set up a LLC to sell our pizza and pasta sauce to corporate chains, and it took off like a bat out of hell.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be the one learning about manufacturing plants, vetting the contracts of chain grocery stores, or manning booths at local farmer’s markets, but here I am. All that has led to an even crankier, more exhausted version of me, which is why I look forward to Sundays.
Sunday, my one relatively quiet day, where I don’t put in too much work or end my night cleaning the kitchen at my family’s restaurant.
Except my alone time is about to be interrupted.
A little farther ahead on the sidewalk, someone is kneeling among a plethora of items. As I get closer, I realize their grocery bag broke, the flimsy paper torn clean through and deposited their haul all over Newton Street. Whoever it is has a white ball cap low on their head, so I can’t make them out, but it would be a dick move of me not to aid them in gathering up the contents of their bags.
After all, I probably do know them in some form or another; you don’t live in Hope Crest without knowing pretty much everyone. It’s both a blessing and a curse being from a small town because if I don’t help and just walk on by, that will probably be fodder for the gossip mill in under two hours.
