A Real Story

My daughter set up the profile on a Sunday afternoon because I kept saying I’d get to it and never did. She picked three photos — one from my niece’s wedding, one gardening, one with my late husband’s dog, Biscuit, cropped so it was just me. I told her to write “loves to laugh” and she looked at me like I’d asked her to put ketchup on a steak. She wrote about my tomatoes instead, the ones I’ve been babying on the back porch since Gordon died three years ago.

For two weeks I got messages from men clearly using photos from twenty years and forty pounds ago, plus one gentleman in Ohio who kept calling me “sweetcheeks” until I blocked him. I nearly deleted the whole thing on a Tuesday night with a glass of wine in hand, convinced this was a young person’s game I had no business playing at 64. Then a message came in from a man named Walt, a retired electrician from two towns over, who didn’t compliment my smile — he asked what variety of tomato I was growing because his looked “sad and yellow” and he wanted advice.

We texted about blight for four days before he asked me to the farmers market on a Saturday morning, which felt like the least date-like date possible and somehow put me completely at ease. He showed up in work boots with a thermos of coffee for both of us, no cologne, no performance. We spent two hours arguing gently about whether heirloom tomatoes are worth the trouble, and he walked me to my car and shook my hand, which made me laugh out loud right there in the parking lot. It’s been eleven months now, and his tomatoes still look sad and yellow, but he keeps growing them anyway, and he keeps showing up.