A Lifetime of Work

There was a black man once who loved me. He was a beautiful man, a kind and generous soul. He was my neighbor in Cleveland. He moved into the house next door to us five years before Walt died. He was a widower and his name was Jonah. He had moved to Cleveland from Tupelo, Mississippi during the war. He took great pride in his home. He used to spend all day painting it and repairing things like window frames and doors, or a wobbly brick or two in his big front porch, filling the cracks with fresh mortar, or replacing the capstone on a terra cotta finial, and sanding the filigreed iron balustrade that led up the stairs to his front door. He liked to dig and poke in the soil, tending the yellow roses in his back yard and the vines on the trellis that bore him wild grapes. He kept a small vegetable garden there, too, and in summer, when the tomatoes ripened, he would lean across the fence and offer me a handful of those red tomatoes. He’d say, “How are you today, Miss Martya? You are lookin’ as lovely as a sunflower in a field of clover.” And he’d offer a bunch to me, still clinging to the vine, reach out to me over the short wooden fence that separated us and was painted a forest green, and I couldn’t be but tempted by the sight, how delicious and tender the tomatoes looked nestled in those coarse hands of his, those carob colored hands, chiseled by a lifetime of work.