Mindful Living: The Sublime Sweetness of Vermont Tomatoes and what my Dad had to do with all that.

By Cybèle Elaine Werts
CybeleW@aol.com  
www.supertechnogirl.com 


Just outside my hometown of Hinesburg is a farmstand that sells organic tomatoes, so ripe and red that I'm bound to eat one before I even get home. They drip all over but I don't care; they are a sublime expression of summer, meant to be eaten warm from a sultry Vermont sun. I have this appreciation for tomatoes because my father grew them when he lived at Pendle Hill, a Quaker center for study and contemplation in Pennsylvania. So really this story begins when my own Vermont tomatoes were just a twinkle in that farmer's eye.

Around the time I went off to college, my father gave up the life I had known him to live. He was an analytical sort, a research statistician who published journal articles that even now I cannot make heads or tails of. He always said he was famous within a group of ten specialists in the world, but otherwise unknown. Even so, he did it with flair, so much so that he quite often was on the verge of being fired for not kissing up properly. I like to think that I got both my linear thinking and my insubordination from him.

After a lifetime of number crunching and sometime sojourns to Pendle Hill for long weekends, he decided to live there permanently, which he would do for the few short years before his death. Although he wasn't technically Quaker, he felt that their beliefs were in alignment with his. He liked the contemplative nature of the place and their consciousness about the interconnectedness of life. Although the unstructured nature of things there was sometimes challenging to his methodical way of thinking, perhaps it was that very aspect that allowed him to explore a different path.

Although he professed to be an agnostic prior to this move, he and I attended morning Quaker meetings there, meetings which still go on every morning more than twenty years later. In the dark silence of the chapel I felt a moving spirit which seemed more authentic somehow than the chatter of most church services. To be guided by spirit rather than a pulpit requires a different kind of faith as well as the awareness and acceptance that God speaks to all of us, not just an anointed few.

After those morning interludes, he spent his time as a handyman, a skill that I was not even aware he possessed. It turns out that he shared this interest with my older sister as she grew up, leading to her becoming a handywoman as well. To me he talked philosophy, usually while sanding something or other. In the cool of the shed which smelled sweetly of wood shavings, he shared his passion for working with real things, something which had been lacking in his former life. Unlike his career with theory and ideas, he could see the immediate impact of this kind of work. That is, when he fixed a chair, we now had something to sit on.

One day we visited the garden where he was practicing another talent hitherto unknown. There in the hot summer sunshine was a metal rack filled to bursting with ripe tomatoes; rich and lush, fragrant in the late afternoon sun. I paused in the garden's silence, awed by the abundance. For the first time, I looked at those tomatoes not as something to toss in the salad, but as a small manifestation of spirit. I let my mind wander over them in a different way, a soulful way. I searched for the tomato that was "right" and when I found it, we stood right there and bit into them like apples, juice dripping down our chins.

There is no taste that comes close to a tomato eaten just barely off the vine and still warm with the heat only summer can bring. That too was made better knowing that he loved me so. When we were done, he snapped off a few ears of corn and we went off to the kitchen to boil them up and lather them in creamy butter. I loved the kitchen because between meals it was cool with a gentle silence. That corn rivaled the tomatoes in their expression of summer fulfilled.

If this all sounds a bit romantic, well I blame my dad for that, even though I doubt he viewed himself as the romantic sort. He didn't put his passions into words so much as he simply lived them. One thing he taught me is that following your passion is a risk worth taking, even if it means giving up a lifetime of the familiar. Daddy did, and thank God he did, because he would die unexpectedly not soon after. Those few years were the happiest of his life, existing only because he chose living his truth over safety and familiarity.

The second thing he taught me was that there is a singular integrity to working with the real things of life. Tables to be sanded, tomatoes to be bathed in the sun, and friends who are waiting dinner on you because corn on the cob just isn't the same without your laughter topping it. This is not to say that the world of the mind is not a beautiful one, rather that spirit can so much the easier be found in the day-to-day things of life.

This winter I will visit Pendle Hill on a pilgrimage of my own. I suppose I'll be looking for the spirit of my father, now dead over twenty years. Perhaps I'll find him in a chair by a dusty ray of sunshine coming through the library window. I sometimes caught him there laughing to himself as he read. Perhaps I'll find him in the dining room where he delighted in big plates of corn slathered with too much butter and salt. Or perhaps sitting in the serene darkness of the work shed, spreading varnish in long smooth strokes so that an old chair can be set anew. I might then pull out a few of those ever so luscious tomatoes that I picked up from the farmstand down by my house and hand him one with a smile. I think he'd grin back at me with that twinkle in his blue eyes, and then take a big big bite.


~~~

Pendle Hill, a Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation
http://pendlehill.org/ 

The Hinesburg Farmstand is on Rte 2A in between Interstate 89 and Rte 116 going toward Hinesburg proper. They also have lots of other yummy vegetables.

The Tomato Singers

In Memoriam:
Charles Earl Werts
February 4, 1930 – December 26, 1982
We sprinkled his ashes in the garden at Pendle Hill
Born in Queens, NH
His mother's maiden name was Edith Ross.

Copyright 2004