When I looked at my grandfather, I didn't see a farmer. I saw a commander, a strategist--a general in a cornfield.
Some of my earliest memories are of picking tomatoes in my grandfather’s garden. Ten-year-old me didn’t even like tomatoes, but the memories are vivid nonetheless: steaming humidity from wet earth under the hot July sun, pungent and ripening red fruit, and thick, moist air that was hard to breathe and made you sweat and itch intolerably as you worked.This is only the first stage of what my grandfather dubbed “the tomato project.” By the end of the day we will have produced 400 quarts of juice after picking, washing, stemming, pulverizing, straining, bottling, and boiling hundreds upon hundreds of tomatoes. It isn’t my grandfather’s only “project,” either. A month later will be the “corn project.” In October is the “apple project”—three pickup truckloads of apples turned into 400 gallons of fresh apple juice in the dizzying span of a few hours. Everything is done on a titanic scale, and my grandfather is at the center of all of it.
