It is a curious practice, tomato pruning. It requires confidence, foremost, surety of hand and volition, for it asks that you take much from these plants, amputating hopeful young suckers, redirecting energy towards their fruit. It feels almost cruel.

As long as I can remember, my grandfather pruned the tomatoes. He had a little veggie garden at his home in upstate New York, properly separate from the ornamentals that were my grandmother’s charge. He had a little fence around it, the only portion with a fence, a part of a constant arms-race with the groundhogs who so enjoyed his zucchini. I remember he caught one, once, and we drove for what felt like an eternity to a child, it caged in the trunk, to some forest somewhere and watched it skitter off into the woods.

His tomato pruning (uncompromising) and its results (bounteous) were always a point of discussion in the family, an sign of hereditary green thumb gifted, perhaps, by his grandfather who, according to family legend, brought it with him when he emigrated from Sicily and started farming in Connecticut.

It is only in retrospect that I see how much that all meant to me, how much of my life, and especially my writing, has been shaped by that little garden. Studying abroad in Italy for the past year, the distance has only deepened my sense of loss.

It was a very cold and very dark February day on the Vineyard, late winter in 2023, when it first hit me. My grandfather always sent me candy on Valentine’s (he sent candy for any excuse), and I always called after, and we talked about how much I had already eaten, and how his little porch garden was doing. Every time it got harder; a series of minor strokes have gradually eroded his ability to speak, to express himself. On that call in February, we could barely talk at all. We ended the call and I bawled, on that cold pitch black night.

Red and black were the colors of that winter: black for the night, always earlier and colder, and red for the heating lamp always on then for my chickens, still just chicks then, hand-raised, indoors.

I sat for many hours next to that red lamp in our Edgartown home, facing those black windows, tending to the chicks, while also starting my tomato crop indoors. There was plenty of planning and watering and monitoring of the little cylinders of newspaper I used as planters, and then watching seedlings spring from seeds of the previous year’s tomatoes. I fretted over their health as they almost died, and sent pictures to my mother to show my grandfather and ask his advice.

Spring came and my family arrived. I had put the tomato seedlings outside on the porch to harden before being planted in the garden beds. But with each move they only looked sicker.

My grandfather couldn’t speak much, but he enjoyed the tomato drama. He chuckled when me and my mother bickered over the plants, each of us making our case to him on whether they would make it past March or should be replaced.

Eventually, I was vindicated and the tomatoes grew jungle-lush, required near-daily pruning. My grandfather, seated with his arms-crossed, supervised my work. He sometimes helped, too, puttering about (old men, when happy, tend to putter rather than shuffle) with a grip of green stems. Our hands were stained all summer.

My time in Italy this winter has been a kind of return, the first of my family to properly live in Italy since the family left a century ago, here pursuing a year-long course of study in the Italian language. Even that old family story is changed. My Italian has become good enough to research my roots and find some terse documentation of my ancestor Antonio (Age at emigration: 19, Language: Italian. Profession: farm hand. Literacy: none), and to discover that he came not from Sicily, but Campania. It makes sense, now, why my professors keep commenting, upon hearing about my family recipes, that they all seem to be Napolitano.

Over the century since they crossed the Atlantic, memories of my family history have shifted and dwindled. To try and stake your claim, to build as immutable structure your identity, is a losing battle. Time always takes it, always.

And yet, if we are lucky, the most important things remain. Here, all around me, I see how the ruins crumble, yet olive groves remain. Better, therefore, to tend to your garden, as my grandfather always did.

Thomas Humphrey is a former reporter for the Vineyard Gazette.