Remembering Mom: She Knew Her Tomato Plants

Back in the old days, we would buy a bag of pot and hope that no more than a fourth of it was stems and seeds. No matter what we tried, there were no good ways to consume the stems and seeds to get high. Just smoking the crap was more likely to give you a headache than a high. If a wayward seed made its way into a joint or a bowl of weed, it would pop like popcorn, except there were no kernels. The lit portions blown out by the seed popping were going to be holes in your shirts and cloth seats.

One of my final antics before leaving home was to use some of the seeds to start about twenty plants. I did it in the closet of my upstairs bedroom with a sun lamp my dad once used.

It wasn't an overly well-thought-out plan. Even cousin Guy caught me. I had to beg him to not tell on me.

I had sprouted the plants and transferred the sprouts to dirt. The tallest ones were getting close to a foot tall, but most of them were not that big.

One night, for no reason at all, Mom came up to see why we were ignoring what she was telling us to do and saw the extension cord that ran from the plug in the room and under the closet door to the sun lamp. She opened the door and asked me what I was growing.

There was only one thing I could do at that point: offer up one lie and hope like hell she bought it. "Tomatoes," I offered.

"I was in 4H in high school, Tom," she replied. "These are not tomato plants."

That was the day I learned that she was in 4H in high school.

The plants were destroyed that night. I had some explaining to do. Dad wanted to know how I got seeds. He would not believe me that seeds were part of the deal when we bought lids. He said there is no way people would buy marijuana if they could grow it, so the people who grow it would never sell the seeds so that could be done.

Dad may also have been in 4H, I don't know. By the time he saw the plants, Mom had already established that they were not in the tomato family!

They determined the best way to destroy the plants were to cut them up into small pieces and flush the pieces down the toilet. Almost all of the plants were destroyed that way. I was able to get some of the leaves into my pockets, and that portion was destroyed by fire!