Thinking of Tomatoes on a Dreary Tuesday

This May Day I’m thinking of tomatoes. Sure, it’s cloudy and 59 degrees outside my office in Marina Del Rey, but fresh, ripe tomatoes seem eminently possible when the calendar crosses that critical threshold from April to May. This is a time of year when anything is possible: a canopy of purple jacarandas over the entire city, fresh sprouts of basil poking up through the moist soil where just yesterday there was nothing, a first kiss on a giant trampoline under the stars. Life is bursting at the seems of the known world, threatening to pop out and take over.

Four years ago today, when I moved into my new house, I felt just how heavy life was with potential—tomatoes, hardwood floors, dinner parties. I want to recapture that feeling and hold onto it today: life is bursting with potential.

If I had not planted that first tomato—

If I didn’t know the difference between

store-bought and those bright red ones, straight out of the ground—

if my grandpa was the type to stay in a hotel on vacation,

and not the type to dig up worms with us in the backyard

for fishing trips that started when the sky still looked like a fresh bruise—

then maybe I wouldn’t have wanted a house in the first place.

I might not have cared about vitamin D, or the fresh tang

that ripe tomatoes add to lasagna,

and I wouldn’t have written that letter to Lee Ching Chu.

I might have cared too much that her house was pale

pink with red carpet and 1970s linoleum.

Maybe it was my grandpa,

or maybe my dad, who got a shard of metal

screwed into his eye and scraped his back on a nail,

or my mom, who picked out blue checkered wall paper and,

just two years ago, got “real furniture.”

But I got that house with the pale pink bedroom

and I ripped up that red carpet and swept up the padding

that deteriorated on the bare wood floors.

I certainly wouldn’t have painted it Sea Mist with Rapids accents—

not myself—and wouldn’t have even known it was possible

to scrape paint splatters off the windows with a razor blade.

And I wouldn’t be waiting now to set up my bed in this bright, new

body of water, where morning sun filters in

over the green grass, alive with crickets

and waiting for its first ripe tomato.

I like crops so much as a metaphor. Almost as much as I like them for literal, delicious selves. I want life to grow like plants—you set growth in motion and something wonderful takes over. Something so wonderful you can live off it—sustaining, indestructible, self-repairing. Just add water and harvest.