What drifts away

I plop a grape tomato directly into my mouth from my dirty hand. My grandpa checks the garden on his way to the rusty metal drum where he burns our garbage. Anything that can’t be composted goes there. I follow him around like a vestigial farmhand, snapping tomatoes off the vine while he pokes around the chicken wire that scaffolds burgeoning fruits on the hill behind our house and the remains of a crumbling barn. I proudly march behind him, holding the pea green Pyrex bowl at my hip to gather our spoils. My older sister ahead of me has her own container filled higher than mine. We race around to get our bowls filled, eager to show off who is the better helper. My grandpa turns his head to the side and smiles, flashing the gap where he misses a molar.

On what would have been my grandpa’s 81st birthday, a few weeks after his death, I sit in my back yard in a plastic Adirondack chair that feels dangerously close to collapsing in the soft ground beneath me. I take a swig of my Old Milwaukee tall boy after raising it to the sky above me. I stare at my tomato plants, the ones he helped me start, and fade myself in and out of what memories I have left of following my grandfather through his own garden.

Growing up, tending the giant hill out back was my favorite activity. It was a tall hill that overlooked a valley containing our modest house as well as enough others to sustain an elementary…