In Risa Bear’s “Too Soon,” an old woman stands at a discount store buying tomato seedlings she never wanted. The varieties she longs for—Cherokee Purple, Brandywine—are heirlooms, their names dense with colour, place, and inheritance. But the clerk only sells what arrives, scanning each three-inch pot as though it were a bag of chips or a box of three-penny nails. The verb “wands” is quietly double: it describes the barcode reader’s gesture, yet it also suggests a hollow magic that turns living plants into inventory. From this small transaction, the poem opens a wider meditation on what is lost when specificity gives way to convenience.
The movement between third and first person dramatises that loss. At first the old woman is seen from outside: “These are not the tomatoes she wanted.” Then her own voice breaks in: “Really, the old woman muses, I should have / Ended my day at the seedsman...” The slide from she to I makes the regret intimate, while the parenthetical “what, twenty miles?” reproduces the rhythm of self-justification. The free verse is shaped by short, broken lines and enjambment: breaks after “wands,” “young,” and “of” force the eye to pause, as if the woman were turning each thought over before letting it go. There is no regular rhyme, but internal echoes—heirlooms and Brandywines, produce and fruits, sameness and safety—hold the meditation together.
The tomato imagery carries the emotional weight. Old varieties are not merely nostalgic; they are repositories of sharp, contradictory feeling. The most startling claim is synesthetic: old varieties “taste of the eyes of young / Men, of weeping, of laughter, of / A child’s anger at being teased, of / The confusion of having one’s braid pulled.” Flavour is crossed with sight, desire, grief, joy, and childhood humiliation. That list insists a full life has not just sweetness but awkward, specific, even painful notes. The hybrids, by contrast, “produce / Heavy fruits that please her folks and friends,” but they remain mute. They are productive and uniform, and to the old woman “there’s something in them lacking.” The alliteration of heavy fruits and folks and friends underscores the social pressure of that bounty.
The poem’s central idea is not simply that old tomatoes are superior. It is that the woman has accepted a safe, prolific, same-flavoured substitute before she was ready to let go of intensity. Her choice is practical—the seedsman is twenty miles away—but it “hurt[s] her soul.” The heirlooms stand for distance, difficulty, particularity, and memory; the hybrids stand for ease, abundance, and the good opinion of others. That small compromise becomes a figure for a larger early surrender.
The ending turns the metaphor outward: “End to youth, beginning of sameness; a / Safety that came to her too soon.” The break after the indefinite article isolates “safety,” so the word feels less like security than like an interruption, a thing delivered before its proper season. The poem does not condemn safety; it mourns its timing. Its significance lies in the way a handful of discount-store seedlings becomes a lament for lost biodiversity, lost youth, and lost particularity at once, while remaining rooted in the scanner, the unpurchased Cherokee Purple, and the remembered pull of a braid.