I went out to the garden barefoot Sunday morning to grab a tomato for Garrett’s eggs and the leaves were gray. Not dewy gray. Gray gray. There was a fine dust on every horizontal surface in my yard, and when I picked a Cherokee Purple off the vine and took a bite right there in my pajamas, it tasted, and I am being precise on purpose, like a spent shell casing. Like if you licked a 9V battery and then tried to remember a tomato. I spit it into the mulch and stood very still and did the math.
The Schmidts live four houses down. They are perfectly nice people. Randy Schmidt coaches my middle son’s rec soccer and his wife Tammy made the welcome lasagna when we moved in, and I bring this up because I want it on record that I am not a vindictive woman. I am, however, the woman who watched Randy back a rented U-Haul into his driveway Friday night, and on Saturday morning Tammy told me at the mailbox, beaming, that he had driven to a fireworks superstore outside Spartanburg and spent six hundred dollars on “the real ones, the ones North Carolina won’t let you have.” She said it the way you’d announce a pregnancy.
What comes down out of a consumer-grade aerial mortar, per the pinned post in Pyrotechnic Drift and Our Children’s Lungs (a Facebook group with 41,000 members and frankly some of the best moderation I’ve ever seen), is perchlorate, barium nitrate, strontium for the reds, copper salts for the blues, and an aluminum dust that is essentially glitter that wants to hurt you. None of this evaporates. It falls. It falls preferentially onto horizontal surfaces within roughly 400 feet of the launch site, which, and I have measured this with the Lowe’s tape measure in my mudroom, is exactly where my raised beds live.
I went down the rows like a sommelier. The Sungolds tasted like a battery a child had licked and put back in the drawer. The Cherokee Purples, as established, tasted like spent brass. The Brandywines were mealy in a new and political way. The basil was, miraculously, fine, which I attribute to the fact that I had thrown an old bedsheet over it Friday because of the dew point, and that bedsheet is now sealed in a contractor bag in my garage labeled EVIDENCE in Sharpie, because Garrett asked.
I called my sister-in-law Mallory, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse, and she did not even let me finish. She said perchlorate is a known thyroid disruptor in children under four, and the Schmidts’ two grandkids, Brexley and Cabot, who are three and one and a half, were running through Tammy’s oscillating sprinkler all Sunday afternoon in the same yard the mortars went up out of the night before. Mallory said, and I am quoting, “Brooke. Their thyroids.” Then she had to go because someone had brought in a bead.
Now. The pole beans appear to be fine, and I want to explain why, because I know how this sounds. According to an episode of the Soil & Stewardship podcast that my friend Marisa sent me at 6:14 this morning, drift fallout settles by gravity onto whatever’s flat, which is why my squash leaves look like a parking lot in February but my pole beans, which grow vertically up a cattle panel, were essentially behind a windshield. The beans are fine. The beans go in the salad. I will die on this.
Garrett, who I love, threw the contaminated tomatoes into the compost while I was on the phone with Mallory. I had to fish them back out with the kitchen tongs, because the compost is now also contaminated, and put them in a gallon Ziploc in the garage until I figure out who at the state extension office I can mail them to without it becoming a whole thing. The Ziploc is next to the bedsheet. The garage is becoming a museum.
Tammy came over at 4 p.m. with a peach pie and a very sweet apology for “the noise,” which is the word she used, the way you’d say “the breeze,” and I accepted the pie with both hands and a smile and walked it directly to the outside trash can, because the Schmidts’ peach tree is forty feet from the launch pad and those peaches were on the tree Saturday night with their little fuzzy skins open to the sky. I am not going to feed my children a barium peach. I am simply not.
The twins want to know why we can’t have the cherry tomatoes off the vine like normal and I told them next year. I told them next year we will have a beautiful garden and the Schmidts will have moved or found Jesus or taken up pickleball, and we will eat a Sungold straight off the plant the way God intended, warm from the sun and tasting like a tomato, and not, as is currently the situation, like the inside of a glove box.