The Dirt on Nicky

How I got my tiny tomatoes

Near the bottom of a wooded hillside was a modest hut, fashionable for its time, beside a small creek which ambled downhill to a bigger creek which ran the length of a fertile valley all the way to the big river. Among the brambles surrounding the hut were vines with tiny tomatoes. Si gathered leaves and fruit from the forest to prepare meals for her family, and sometimes she took a gourdful of the tiny tomatoes to the gathering place downstream where folks traded what they had for what they wanted but didn’t have.

Si traded the tiny tomatoes for some tubers and hazelnuts from Bo who lived a half-morning walk down the river. Bo was a gardener (like most everybody at the time), and he saved some of the tiny tomatoes for the seeds that he planted and continued to grow years. Bo’s wife had family down by the big river, and they would raft downstream to larger gatherings and trade with folks from other families, and eventually Si’s tiny tomatoes were growing near huts up and down the big river.

Over time, boats replaced rafts, and caravans went places boats could not, and the tiny tomatoes were welcome everywhere. Eventually they found a home a mile inland from the Ionian Sea beside a humble structure where La lived. She was a widow, lived alone, always smiled at the gentle breeze as she picked her tiny tomatoes.

La was the most famous singer in the entire territory, and villagers imposed on her kindness to sing at their festivities. Her nephew Ry accompanied her on his three-stringed instrument, and also helped market her tiny tomatoes. La’s hillside was a dream come true for tiny tomatoes, and, as La sang a parting blessing, Ry would take wagonloads of extra baskets to Parga where he would meet his distant cousin Ne, a trader from Italy.

Ne took La’s tiny tomatoes to ports on both sides of the Italian peninsula – a basket here, another one up the coast – then down to Sicily and over to Tunisia. There he met a farmer’s daughter who fancied him and he her, so he traded his boat for farmland, and he and his new bride grew tiny tomatoes, onions, and pomegranates.

One merchant from Sardinia took a few seeds to his romantic interest named Mu in Portugal, and she, of course, planted them in her garden beside basil and cilantro. Mu, familiar with the peregrinations of sailors, had another love interest who also sailed the Seven Seas who had just been hired for a boat ride to China. But first, he spent a week in the moonlight with Mu drinking plum wine, eating gazpacho and learning Portuguese before his trip to the Far East where he took some tiny tomato seeds.

The captain who had hired Mu’s friend was lucky with weather and wind and made swift passage to southern Asia. He stopped in Mumbai, Singapore, and other exotic ports until a storm forced an unexpected landing on the west side of an island in the Philippines. Mu’s friend was walking along the beach one morning when he met a very old woman beating exotic rhythms on a hollow log. She told him, “I can hear your heart,” and she beat out counterpoint to the rhythm of his heart, so he stopped a while to listen. “You are home now,” she said, so he got his rucksack (which contained the tiny tomato seeds) from the boat and built himself a lean-to.

Years later, the drummer’s great-granddaughter left her village after a typhoon and moved to Arkansas, and she brought the seeds for tiny tomatoes with her. One autumn, some of her tomatoes were washed into a creek by a storm, and downstream where they surfaced the following spring, several seedlings sprouted near a garden. That gardener exchanges plants with me every spring, and she gave me one of the seedlings. They flourished the first year and have self-sown two years in a row in my garden.

So that is how I got my tiny tomatoes. Wonder where they will go next?