It doesn’t grow old. Filling the little trays with soil, scattering a few tomato seeds over, topping with a bit more soil. Keeping them damp and warm by the woodstove. And a week later: tiny sprouts. First I planted Coração de Boi, the last of a package I bought this time last year in the Bolhão market in Porto; those are ones that are just pushing up out of the soil. A few days later, I planted Principe Borghese and Amish Paste after finding some leftover from last year. Next time I’m at the seed library in Sechelt, I’ll check to see if there’s a slicing tomato too. The seeds are so tiny! And within them, such potential. There will be the mornings when the bees hover over the blossoms, particularly Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-face bumble bees, the ones that remind me ancient Greek helmets, and then there will be the mornings when I pick a colander of ripe fruit smelling of every summer we’ve ever had. When I slice a few and drizzle them with the best oil (Frantoia, from Sicily) and scatter some basil over, with some flaky salt. I could eat this every day (and often I do, for weeks). It doesn’t grow old.
Another thing that doesn’t grow old? An editor writing to say, yes, we will take this essay! The essay in question? “On Swimming and the Origins of String”. It will be appear in the next issue of the Temz Review. I’ll link to it once it’s up.
And another thing? Hearing that one of my books is being read by a class. In this case, it’s The Weight of the Heart, along with its companion texts, Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel and Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. If you’ve read my novella, you’ll know that its protagonist is a young woman writing a thesis that she thinks of as a feminist cartography of B.C. She’s doing the work I might have done at her age if I’d known I could. Could insist on the importance of those books, could find an advisor who would support the work, Now that I’m 70, I have some, well, regrets I guess, that I didn’t pursue a more scholarly route through my earlier years. Last Sunday when I saw one of my sons in Vancouver for dinner, I told him I’d been considering applying to graduate school but wasn’t entirely willing to relocate for the coursework, he said it was too bad I hadn’t done it in 2020 when classes went online. (I remember him having to teach his math classes online and I know that it wasn’t easy.) Maybe it’s too late. But the books stack up on my desk and by my bed and I can at least do the reading.
So I’ll grow tomatoes and watch the bees and remember what it was like to walk up the path to Font-de-Gaume, noting the ferns, the dried seedpods of orchids, blue campanula, ivy-leaved toadflax, what it was like to meet the reindeer licking the forehead or antler of a female, and wonder, wonder, what else I could have made of this.
...Theresa Kishkan 