Thank Heaven for Vegetables

Every year I grow vegetables. For me, who usually handles cut flowers so often, there is a different kind of joy in the process of nurturing life with love toward the goal of eating. Precisely because I cannot leave for and return from work at fixed hours, my family’s help is indispensable to raising good vegetables. The morning and evening watering, the extra fertilizer, the pruning, the work of tying vines to their stakes. It is truly the building of deep family bonds that vegetables bring about.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, garlic chives, shishito peppers, green onions—they grow bigger and bigger. As for the harvest, whoever notices a vegetable that has reached eating-ripeness may pick it. The basic rule, though, is that the whole family eats it together. The shapes are poor, but whichever you eat, it has an exceptional taste, precisely because we grew it ourselves.

The education of the heart we receive from vegetables will surely become, for each of us in the years ahead, an irreplaceable and precious “taste of living”—something more than merely a fond memory.