teeny tiny tomatoes

In Santorini, these little guys are worth their weight in gold. The entire island is a miracle of waterless cultivation.

I watered the plants on my balcony -- I’ve been watering them since May -- though probably not as often as I should have. I suspect a little fertilizer would have done them well, or even simply topping off their potting soil. I let them take their own initiative. All things considered, especially the fact that it’s December, I’m thrilled to have borne fruit.

Less crop than weed, more garnish than food, they fruited late and sparse and small.

And that’s perfectly fine by me.

This time last year, I was thinking about home, getting ready to travel. It’s easy to look back and think I could have gone anywhere, whereas now I wait whole mornings, hours and hours, for one 15-minute opp to go to the supermarket. There was a couple last year on the plane, very attractive, unaffected, youngish hippie intellectual types. The guy had prominent wire-frame glasses, crazy corkscrew curls, and a baby daughter in his arms, a tiny quiet thing. The things I wanted then, that kept me moving in a dizzying game of hide and seek and hide, are the same things that keep me in one place now. Still dizzy, still unsure if I’ll ever belong anywhere, taking off in one place and landing somewhere else, and going to the supermarket -- for tomatoes, among other things -- almost every day.