Tomatoes ARE Real Life

This weekend, I'm moving to London.

The tomatoes in the garden aren't ready to be eaten. In fact, I don't know if I'd even call them tomatoes just yet. They are really just little green lumps of taunting promise of someday possibly becoming tomatoes. Now autumn has arrived, though, and with it, the cold weather. So I most likely won't get to try a nice, glossy red, pulpy tomato from my garden before I become a Londoner without a garden.

Tomatoes in picture appear bigger than in Real Life. Actual size: a thumb.

I didn't know a whole heck of a lot about gardening when I started this project. Tomatoes aren't known for growing well in cold weather, and if there's one thing Norway has a lot of, cold weather is it. (If there were two things, the other'd be blond hair.) But I like tomatoes and thought it'd be fun to try to grow them. I didn't ever imagine that they wouldn't become edible in time for autumn.

Summer Vegetables

Last week, it finally happened.

This:

turned into these:

Time

A few months ago, while I was in Germany visiting family, I spent an afternoon with my cousin and her adorably gorgeous 1-year-old. She had been home with him for the first year, but had recently started studying again, so her son was spending days in daycare while she hit the books.

She told me how, after that first day away from him, when she picked him up from daycare, she could tell that he had changed. In those few hours she had been away, he had had experiences, had learned things that she wasn't there to witness, had been alive and grown and developed. This difference in her son was obvious to her, the fact that he was older and more worldly. She told me she had this same sensation often when she picked him up from daycare. In contrast to the first year of his life, during which she spent every moment with him, observing and being a part of every little triumph and setback, she now had the opportunity to gain perspective and see her son at intervals. Even if those intervals were only for a few hours.

[Carrot plants]

I didn't quite buy it. A day is just a day, I thought. People, even babies, don't change that fast. I thought, my cousin is sweet who is that attached to her son, but surely there was no true visible change in him after a single day apart. It was an appealing notion, but I wasn't convinced that's the way the world works.

I'm back!

Last night I had a dream about tomatoes.

It wasn’t all that exciting, except for that these tomatoes were grown in my garden, right outside my window. In the dream, I planted a tomato plant and then forgot about it. A few months later, I went outside and there were three bright red tomatoes hiding in the dirt, ready to be eaten. (I realize that tomatoes grow above ground, but in my dream, they were hiding in the dirt.) And that was all, a short little simple dream.

This was a dream I had last night, but it’s also a real dream of mine, to be able to walk outside, pick a tomato off a vine, chop it up and use it right away.

This little tidbit of a dream also reveals how I want this scenario to become a reality: I want to plant a seed, forget about it for a few months, then come back and enjoy the benefits without putting in the work that is obviously required.