I am five and perched atop the counter. My father is kneeling on the ground, his one knee arranged against a high-top chair, propping up this wielded hulk of metal in my hands. The instrument has passed the time it gleamed with new age, its keys are eroded from years of jazz pressed into it.

I press my bottom lip against the wooden reed, curl my lips along the smooth black plastic, and struggle to breathe out. My father's fingers dance along the keys and a noise forms. With each gust of air, I nurture that noise until the house is enveloped in the honks and squeaks of a five-year-old playing an instrument that requires more breath support than her growing lungs can perform.

~

Saxophone melodies bleed into lullabies that lure the growth of infants, but if you want your tomato plant to grow, you first have to decapitate the signs of growth. The first flower that blooms in the dewy air of the morning should be sliced off by a nurturing hand in the quiet of the afternoon. But when the sun creeps up again, four new flowers are supposed to have buds.

~

Tomatoes need cages to grow upright, but I know that my sister never needed to be propped up on the kitchen counter to play. The clamor of her soft fingers smashing keys was the lullaby to my baby-slumbers. By the time she was 11, she knew three instruments, and all the while, she would say that it wasn’t for her. Each time she got sick of the repetition of movements and rhythms, she drilled over and over again so she could move on.

She took one piano lesson in her life and dismissed her tutor. It wasn’t that her tutor was beneath her, but she figured she could teach herself better without the nagging of repetitive elementary practices.

Each weekend, she committed more and more songs to memory — from “Call Me Maybe” (an anthem for tweens at the time) to the works of Gershwin.

She began to learn the mechanics of music and trained her ear to detect variations in pitches. She familiarized herself with music that she could play in the afternoon, the melodies she’d heard in the morning.

~

Just as the first note in the symphony sets the tone, the first shoot of the tomato plant is dominant. It is the stalk that the seedling took all its life to produce, but it robs the plant of nutrients for its future potential. The growing tip drowns the others in auxin — a hormone that inhibits the bud production of all lesser stems. The lower branches are not simply overshadowed, but they are suffocated. It takes the death of the first for the others to live.

~

When I was seven, I was able to move my practice to a stiff chair with no flex in its backing. My dad took his fingers away from the keys as I learned the pressure needed behind my throat to hit each pitch. I grew to love the taste of grainy wood as I hit my tongue against it.

But the weight of the century-old instrument in my arms was pulling, stretching my thumb to an angle it shouldn’t be bent. The hunk of metal my great-grandfather picked up at the music shop 90 years prior had too much weight for my little hands to carry.

~

I was ten and tried to grow an avocado plant by following a tutorial in a library book. I took the pit from my trash the weekend after my mom made us guacamole. I thrust three toothpicks into its leathery skin.

I nested the seed atop some water. The toothpicks prevented it from becoming submerged, just like the illustration from the library book said to do.

I do not remember how long it took, but, eventually, I had to return the library book, the stalk just barely poking through the brown, leathery skin.

As the stalk grew longer and longer, I dreaded what I knew the book told me to do next. With each new leaf, I knew the shoot's execution day was approaching. The book told me that if I wanted an avocado, I would need to behead it.

~

Before the first day of fourth-grade band, I started calling this tenor saxophone my favorite Hebrew phrase: L’Dor Va’Dor, from generation to generation. But the hunk of metal that had belonged to my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father collapsed under anticipation. Its keys warped, and its sound screamed rather than sang, so I had to send it away to someone who could coax my instrument back into alignment.

The mechanic called and said this instrument was too fragile for a fourth grader: the safest place for L’Dor Va’Dor was in my parent’s closet—collecting dust.

For the fourth grade band, I was gifted an alto saxophone I named Honky. Honky was more appropriate for my stature, and if I coaxed out melodies with no honks, I was promised L’Dor Va’Dor would one day be mine.

~

At the dinner table, I handed all my tomatoes to my sister. Every night, I requested them again on my plate, and every night, I would spit out the little nibbles of red fruit.

My twelve-year-old sister, who had the palette of a food critic and the kindness of a nursery school teacher, gobbled all my untasted tomatoes with glee each time. She was okay with my repeated act of pretend curiosity and not at all opposed to the extra serving of tomatoes.

Even now, as I tend to my own tomato plants, tying them carefully to wooden trellises, I still hate their taste. Despite the revolting thoughts that arise when I think about biting into their blood-colored flesh, I still tend to them as if they were my own children. A loving mother would never eat her children.

~

When I was eleven, I learned how to translate swooshes and scribbles into songs, so I could sit in a chair surrounded by twenty more chairs, each with children wielding their own hunks of metal or wood. But though half of us could never muster the right pitch, and the other half were there only because of their parents' “gentle” push, we created sounds that practically resembled music.

But it wasn’t good enough. I thought my notes were too flat and the key clanking too stiff. I drilled myself into marches, and my inner critic screamed myself lyricals.

But I always played until the last gust of energy escaped my throat.

~

I never was able to chop off my stalk that was supposed to be an avocado. It survived a week after I tucked away my blades, but it shriveled without ever presenting a bloom of an avocado’s promise.

~

After begging my parents for private lessons at age twelve, nightly practices became weekly lessons in a retiree's garage. I never called him his name because I feared getting yelled at for pronouncing it wrong.

So, I spent my hours in the warm garage with walls covered in tattered photos of talented student musicians, students who, by the way, gripped their instruments and seemed like they gave their very life essence to their hunks of metal and wood.

“These students practice more than you, Makena. If you want to be up here, you need to play when you are not in the garage,” my music tutor said when I asked him how I could get a photo of myself on the wall.

I quit those lessons before my face got on the wall.

~

Next to the tomatoes in my garden stood a sunflower twice my height. Or at least it stood that height for a week before the weight of life began dragging it down. Waiting for the seeds to be ready for harvest, I let the stem fold.

The winds of the following weekend tore off the wilted sunflower. The plant was left a callous and scarred stalk, a hunched and broken vessel, shrunken from the massive flower it once carried.

I ignored the plant for days because I couldn't force myself to have a funeral for the dying plant.

~

Despite being the leader of my middle school band, I still needed to place at competitions. I practiced for weeks to get to the same level my sister could get to by sight-reading, and I barely scraped by with a runner’s-up pity award. I was handed excellents instead of superiors and disqualifications in ensembles instead of applause.

I was supposed to be the pillar of the middle school band, and pillars, like a strong stalk of tomato during wind, should not quiver during solos.

When the pandemic sent my band to muted virtual meetings, I uncovered the instrument that lay dusted over in my parent’s closet. The insured instrument would be safe in the confines of my quarantined house. Over glitchy screens, no one could correct my posture or clumsy key clanking.

In my own room, which was beginning to look like a jungle after my pandemic houseplant obsession, I could play the music I wanted to play for my own sake. Being muted, no one could detect if I was the one who squeaked or played the note out of tune. I could play for my own ears, ears that no longer faulted myself for imperfections since the pandemic brought too many other negatives to my life.

With no one to judge but me, I finally learned to love the sound I made with the same instrument my dad and his dad and his dad before him had played.

~

It takes time with no judgment to let something blossom.