The Heart of a Tomato

When I was five years old, my brother used to tell me that plants have souls and feelings just like people do. I didn't believe him at first, because how can you? A plant doesn't talk.

“Does too,” he would say. “When you hear the wind whistle through the trees, that's not the wind, it's the trees.”

Plants can't move.

“Have you ever seen grass sway? Trees rocking back and forth?”

Plants can't cry. How can they be sad if they can't cry?

“You've seen sap, haven't you?”

How do you argue against that when you're five? He had an answer for everything. He even told me about plants that grab flies and plants that will move to face the sun. When I asked mom about it, she patted my head and reassured me he was only teasing me, and that grass was not sad when I walked on it because it did not, in fact, have any feelings at all. I asked her about the fly eating plants and she said they were real. I asked her about the sun chasers and she said they were real too. I asked her about how the trees howled during storms and rocked back and forth, reminding her that I howled and rocked back and forth during bad storms too.

“That's just the wind,” she said dismissively as she added beans to a simmering pot.

I asked her about tree sap, and she confessed she didn't know what purpose it served. That was how I knew my brother was right. He had answers to all of my questions, which meant he knew more than my mom.

“He's making stuff up,” she told me. “That's what brothers do. If he doesn't know the real answer, he lies so you'll think he's smart.”

I almost believed her, too, until I saw her cut a tomato in two to add to the pot. I had seen the heart of the tomato and knew my brother was right after all.

- Originally mailed to P. and D. Goff in Madison, Mississippi