Thank you to all of the day lily and tomato growers who emailed me about last month’s column.
I was lamenting the poor showing of our day lilies this year and absolute lack of showing of any tomatoes on my vines last year. The photo that accompanies this article attests to the fact that my tomatoes are already doing better. Also, I think I have a handle on our day lilies as well. The day lilies ended up blooming better than I expected.
My tomato situation came to mind the other day as we were driving through Belzoni. Jo went with me to Silver City to do a story about the recovery from the March tornado. Silver City, or what’s left of it, is about five miles south of Belzoni. When we finished the story, Jo and I drove on up Highway 49 to grab a bite to eat before going back home.
In Belzoni we remembered one of our grand adventures that happened there several years ago. It started as we were trying to follow some rather obscure directions to the house of one of Jo’s friends. Now, this was before we all had location finders and GPS on our phones. For that matter, it was well before we all had phones in our pockets, too. We used dead reckoning and scribbled notes to get where we were going back then.
After a while all three emerged and came toward the car with bags of squash, tomatoes, corn, and other stuff. They had loaded us up with vegetables from their garden.
Our landmarks included a blue transmission shop where we were to turn left and follow that road until the power lines ran out.
After about a half hour of circling in and out of cotton patches, Jo said I should stop and ask for directions. Normally that statement would have been blasphemous to my manhood. But it was getting late, and I had no idea where we were going, so I compromised. I stopped. But Jo went up to a house to ask for directions.
She knocked on the front door. The door opened and she went inside. Five long minutes later Jo and the couple who lived there came out the back door with paper sacks in their hands and disappeared through the wooden gate into their back yard. After a while all three emerged and came toward the car with bags of squash, tomatoes, corn, and other stuff. They had loaded us up with vegetables from their garden. They also knew Jo’s friend and told us exactly how to get to her house to boot.
Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised. I almost rethought that whole “never ask for directions” thing us men swear by.
As we were backing out of their driveway, I stopped the car and turned to Jo and said, “Let’s stop at the next neighbor’s house down the road and ask for directions again and see what they have in their garden.”
Just as a lark, before we left Belzoni the other day, we put Jo’s friend’s address in our GPS and drove straight to her house.
She wasn’t home.
