Cherry Tomatoes on the Porch

I grew cherry tomatoes in a pot on the porch this year, in the southeast corner, next to the nasturtiums. I had an extra plant and there wasn’t room in the garden. At first I staked it up, but after it got up to five feet, I tied it to the column. Since then it’s bent over with the weight of the carefully clustered fruit. For the past month, they have been sequentially ripening and I have been sequentially picking. It’s all quite convenient.

I like cherry tomatoes, the small red spheres that bring a burst of sweetness in the mouth. The fruit, and it is a fruit not a vegetable, sets itself in paired arrays of four or five. Tiny green peas are magically born from the yellow flowers. The peas swell to marble size before green turns to orange and, eventually, all goes red and ready to eat.

I’ll sometimes eat one in the morning just as the light comes up. Cool from the September night, it’s a little treat. I suppose I could eat a nasturtium blossom to go with the cherry tomato and have a truly ‘al fresco’ salad. But the nasturtiums are too peppery to eat alone and I’m not sure the combination would be good on an empty stomach.

My eyes water in the early morning. My tea is hot. The cars rush by on their important journeys. I’m becoming an old man—not so interested in rushing anymore. Happy to sit slowly on the dark porch and write about flowers and fruit. I pick my way through perception and memory trusting the words to find their own coherence and lead me somewhere I have never been.

I’m a writer of some sort, though I don’t know what sort I could be or what my point might be. One should always have a point. But I write small (and unfinished) essays and poems. Daily I write and send them out over public airways to a few friends, students and colleagues—or whoever else happens to find them. I fancy myself distant kin to the medieval wandering poets of Asia. The ones who didn’t seek fame and fortune but were content to brush their poems onto rocks and scrap pieces of paper.

But the only hermit poets we now know are the ones who had someone else to take over their public relations duties. Or the teachers like Hakuin who began all his writings with a disclaimer of how he was only doing this because his students were begging him and how he would rather remain silent. All the while, it turns out, he was writing letters to wealthy patrons to raise money for his next publication enterprise. A healthy ego, a large ego, it turns out is useful for publication and dissemination.

But not so much for happiness. Large ego, small ego is just one more thing to work with. More and bigger is rarely better. I read a study many years ago that claimed to have discovered the optimum number of lovers for happiness—turns out it was one. The cultural imperative for more and bigger and better is the endless trap. Well-published and best-selling authors are not happier than those of us that write in smaller ways. (Even if we do dream…)

The morning moon glitters through the dark leaves of a maple tree to the east. Light seeps in everywhere and seems intent on hiding the moon before it can rise to the open sky. The gurgle of water falling into the koi pond fills the sound space between cars. The rushing cars too sound, if you listen in the right way, like water—like waves rushing up on the beach and falling away. Everything comes as it is and I’m the one who says good or bad. This reminds me of that. That reminds me of this. Nothing is a thing alone.

If I stay very still, I can find my way right to where I am. And if I sense the faint scent that invades my nose, I can follow it right to where I am.