Starting to write

I want to write but I don't know yet how to self-start so I'm using the blog as an imaginary teacher telling me that I have to produce some writing each day. I don't need it to be read but it would be a bonus. My first attempt is from a writing class where the participants were given a tomato - I've ended it too quickly I think with a rather woman's magazine story last line but I'm not sure where to go with it now - expand it to a normal short story length or not?

Tomatoes

She crossed tomatoes off her shopping list with an aching heart. He’d always loved them. As a baby, she’d pushed him down to the shops, her bag was too full and she’s rested the tomatoes in their plastic container on his lap as he seemed to be asleep. It was a long weary walk back up the hill to the house, and she was thinking of other things, so it wasn’t until she looked down at him as she opened the gate, that she realised they’d all gone – he had steadily and quietly eaten his way through a whole punnet of cherry tomatoes.

It had started then, his love affair with them. He could always be pacified in a supermarket trolley queue or on a long car journey with a timely produced tomato. He moved on from cherries to larger traditional British tomatoes, and then to Italian plums. He was a brave child, and tried yellow and green tomatoes too, with varying levels of enthusiasm.

He would eat anything with that tomato colour –her friends marvelled at the range. Never interested in sweets but always pleased with a tomato – it didn’t seem quite normal. He often smelt them before eating them whole – could clearly distinguish different species by smell before he could talk properly. ‘Mato’ he would say hopefully, when he saw her with shopping bags.

Her days always had a tomato part to them –slicing them up in the morning to go in his packed lunch sandwiches, putting some in a bowl for after-school, and later chopping them for a Bolognese. “How many” she thought “have I had through my fingers in these 18 years?” The squishy way they fall apart when you try to slice them neatly, or spurt seeds into your face and eyes. She tried to keep a fairly clean kitchen but there were always tomato seeds, on her chopping board, her bread board, her work surfaces. She loved the way you could put whole tomatoes in boiling water and just wait, and how satisfactorily they would give up their skins, and emerge clean and whole. Then the chopping and adding to the pan; the smell of garlic and onion as a base topped with the sweetness of the tomatoes – it would always remind him of home, she realised.

As he got older, there were more tomato-related activities – trips to France and Italy where he realised how fresh tomatoes could really taste, and how just entering a French supermarket, the smell could almost knock you over and have you racing to the till so you could eat one as soon as possible – the wholeness in the mouth, the n crushed with the teeth and the delicious pulp to savour. He began to cook for himself but always sauces for pasta and always starting with tomatoes – he discovered basil and pesto – but it had to be red pesto, his tomato fix for that meal.

Each shop she did for the family included at least 5 types of tomato – everyday for sandwiches, baby cherries for snacking, baby plums, and jars of dun-dried tomato paste to make paninis, with larger plums for cooking and tinned chopped in packs of 4 for the days when he’d eaten all the fresh. His mates found his snacks hilarious- no ham sandwiches but toasted paninis with fresh tomatoes, sun-dried tomato paste, basil and mozzarella – the smell of them cooking filled her kitchen everyday, and would undoubtedly cause her to cry for months after he’d gone.

She bought a special knife to slice tomatoes thinly on the plate in the Italian way, before dressing with basil and oil – leaving the flavours to linger but having to keep the bowl hidden so that he wouldn’t eat it before dinner time.

How has one item of food becomes so associated for me with the loving of one child, she though to herself. The pang this brought was so visceral she almost gasped out loud – how can we spend so long giving them what they desire and then overnight we’re supposed to stop, as if it was a tap you could off the day they left home. Her shopping list looked odd, lonely somehow, with only the one pack of tomatoes. Well, she’d just have to get used to it, she told herself briskly – and then began to plan a shopping list full of tomatoes for his return at Christmas……….