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26 July 1998 (Sunday)

Report from Mrs. Weaver's fence. The first tomato plant is taller than me, which is not so difficult. It has nine fruits, still green, and they have already the shape, the heart shape, a little lopsided, with shoulders. The second plant is smaller and sulky. I talk to both. Mrs. Weaver talks to her peonies, so nobody in this backyard can say anything.

Misha is learning to drive. He has his permit, and on Sunday mornings I sit next to him in the parking lot behind the greenhouse when it is empty. He drives very well and very fast. I hold the handle over the door. He says, "Mam, you are breathing loud." In Moscow nobody we knew had a car until 1990. We rode the metro. It is the most beautiful metro in the world and I miss it every day, especially in the parking lot behind the greenhouse.

A letter from Galya with a photograph: Nastya in a white blouse, very serious, finished now with her second year at the pedagogical institute. She looks like Mama around the eyes. Galya writes that the bank sent a paper saying the money is growing nicely. She drew a little smiling face next to it.

3 July 1998 (Friday)

Hot. Ninety-four degrees outside, which is thirty-four and a half Celsius, and inside the houses it is more, even with the shade cloth and the big fans. We are moving the poinsettia stock plants and drinking water like horses.

A small scene. This afternoon Misha came to House 4 with a message and said, loud, in front of Brent, "Doctor Mom, phone call." He calls me this for a joke. Brent said, "Doctor?" I said, "Of biology. Candidate of Sciences. It is like a Ph.D., only a little bit harder." Brent said, "Huh." Then he went away.

That was all. Misha thought I would be angry. I was not angry. I am curious what "huh" means in this case. English has many small words that do all the work, like ants.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. We will watch the fireworks from the high school field with Mrs. Weaver, who brings folding chairs and a thermos of lemonade and does not approve of the loud ones.

17 June 1998 (Wednesday)

School is finished. Misha is officially not a sophomore anymore. "Sophomore," I have learned, comes from the Greek for "wise fool," which is very accurate for sixteen. His report card: A in chemistry, A in geometry, B in English, B in something called Health, where they teach how not to smoke. He says the B is because he argued with the teacher about statistics. I believe him.

He will work at the greenhouse this summer in the retail part, with the customers. Mr. Landis hired him in five minutes. For me it took three weeks and a test where I had to identify twenty plants. I identified twenty-two, because two of the pots had weeds in them also. I think this is why I was hired.

My two tomatoes are planted now in Mrs. Weaver's backyard, next to her peonies. Mrs. Weaver is our landlady, a widow, seventy-one, raised Mennonite and still plain in her ways, though not so strict now, she says. "I have a television," she told me once, "but I don't enjoy it." She gave me a corner by the fence where the sun comes all afternoon. She asked what kind of tomatoes. I said, "My mother's." She nodded as if this is a real variety name.

It is, I think.

15 May 1998 (Friday)

At work today everybody talks about a television show which ended last night. Lupe says it was a show about nothing. Brent watched it at a party on a very big television. I said in my country we had a show about nothing for seventy years, and it also had a very disappointing last episode. Nobody laughed except Mr. Landis, who is seventy-four and laughs at everything I say, possibly because of my accent.

Also Frank Sinatra has died. This I understood. Andrei, Misha's father, had a Sinatra record that a colleague brought back from Helsinki, and we played it on Saturdays until it was grey. Now in Moscow the new rich men in leather jackets sing "My Way" at karaoke, very badly. Andrei would have hated this. Andrei hates many things; it is his hobby.

News from under the bench: of my twelve seeds, two came up. I did not want to write it until they had true leaves. Two out of twelve, seventeen percent germination. As a scientist I say this is a poor result. As Mama's daughter I say this is two tomatoes more than I had last month.

9 May 1998 (Saturday)

Today in Russia is Victory Day. Papa would have put on his jacket with the medals and gone to meet the other old soldiers in the park, and come home late and a little drunk and very quiet. He died in 1985, before everything changed. Sometimes I think this was a mercy.

Here today is the Saturday before Mother's Day, the biggest day of the year for the greenhouse. The parking lot was full at eight in the morning. Men in baseball caps carried out hanging baskets the way you carry a cake. One man asked me which basket his mother would like. I said, "What does your mother like?" He thought for a long time and said, "Purple?" I sold him a purple one. I hope it was correct.

Twelve hours on my feet. Misha picked me up because my back would not let me drive. In the car he gave me a card, one day early, because he knows tomorrow I will work again. On the front is a cat in sunglasses. Inside he wrote in Russian, with two mistakes, "To the best mother in two countries."

I did not correct the mistakes. That is also a first for me.

28 April 1998 (Tuesday)

Hanging baskets. Four hundred of them: fuchsia, and ivy geranium, and a new petunia called "Wave" which spreads like gossip. Brent, the manager, is the son-in-law of Mr. Landis, who owns the greenhouse. Brent has a degree in business and a cellular telephone on his belt. Today he watched me for some time and then said, "Elena, you gotta pick up the pace." I picked it up. I am not sure where I put it.

Twenty-two years I crossed tomatoes. I emasculated the flowers with forceps at six in the morning, before the bees woke up. I mapped genes for resistance to root-knot nematode when mapping was done with patience and not with machines. Now I pinch petunias so they will branch. Honestly, both are genetics. The petunia does not know the difference and I am trying not to know it either.

I earn seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. At the Institute in 1993 I earned, in dollars, about eleven dollars a month, when they paid. So in one sense I am a great success.

A secret. Under the bench in House 4, behind the flats of alyssum, I have sown twelve seeds of Mama's tomatoes. Bych'e serdtse, "Bull's Heart": a big pink one, heart-shaped, ugly and wonderful, which every babushka in Russia grows at her dacha. I carried these seeds in 1994 in the pocket of my coat, in an envelope with Mama's handwriting. I did not declare them. I apologize now, publicly, to the United States Department of Agriculture.

I did not plant them before because our first apartment had only a parking lot. And maybe also because once seeds are planted, they are gone. They are more than five years old now. We will see.

19 April 1998 (Sunday)

Khristos voskrese! Christ is risen. Today is our Easter, one week after the American one, because the Orthodox church counts by the old calendar, which I have given up explaining at work. Lupe, who works next to me at the potting bench, says we Russians are late for everything, even the Resurrection. Lupe is from Michoacan and has three children and no patience, and I like her very much.

Last night I baked kulich, the tall Easter bread, in two coffee cans, because this is how the Russian ladies do it in America. Somebody discovered many years ago that a coffee can is exactly the right shape, and now it is tradition. Misha colored the eggs with onion skins. They come out red-brown like old furniture. We went to the late service and came home at three in the morning, and Misha fell asleep with his shoes on.

In the afternoon I called Galya, my sister, with a phone card. Twenty minutes, and then the card is finished and a recorded woman says goodbye for you.

Galya has sold Mama's dacha. The buyer is a man with a new car who will tear down the house and build something with a garage for two cars. I did not expect it to hurt so much. I have not seen the dacha in four years. She is putting the money in a bank, a real bank with a marble lobby, for her daughter Nastya's future. The interest is very high. Good, I said. Better than a jar in the kitchen, like Mama kept hers.

I told her to keep all of it. I am in America. I have what I need.

That was mostly true.

9 April 1998 (Thursday)

My son Misha made this page for me in one evening, between his chemistry homework and a telephone call which lasted one hour and ten minutes (I measured). He says everybody in America has a home page now. I said this is not possible. He showed me a page made by a dog. Well. The dog writes better English than I do, but I am told that is not the point.

So. My name is Elena Morozova. I am forty-seven years old. For twenty-two years I was a plant geneticist at an institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where I crossed tomatoes, and counted them, and crossed them again. Since 1994 I live in Pennsylvania, near Lancaster, with Misha, who is sixteen and a sophomore at the high school. I work at a commercial greenhouse. Here I also cross tomatoes, but only the aisle, with a hose.

Misha chose the name of the page. "Seeds of Change." He is very pleased with it. I think it sounds like an advertisement for a bank.

I will write here in English, because I must practice, and because my sister in Moscow has no computer and so cannot read what I say about her. (Galya, if somebody prints this for you: I say only good things.)

This week we are transplanting impatiens. Eleven thousand flats before Mother's Day. My hands smell of wet peat moss even after I wash them three times. In Moscow my hands smelled of ethanol from the laboratory. I am not sure which is better. Peat, I think.