My grandmother has a small vegetable field out in the countryside.
When I was a child, every year during summer vacation I was sent to stay at my grandmother’s house.
Back then I found country life, where I could not even play video games, boring, and I hated going.
I was woken up at five in the morning and made to help in the field before it got hot.
Harvesting tomatoes and cucumbers, pulling weeds, watering the plants — for a child, that work was anything but easy.
My hands got covered in mud, my arms were bitten by mosquitoes, and by noon I was already exhausted.
But as she worked, my grandmother taught me all sorts of things.
That vegetables will always respond to you if you tend to them every day.
That vegetables grown while coping with the weather and the insects taste many times better than the ones you buy in a store.
And that you must never waste food.
My grandmother often said, “As long as you are touching the soil, you can forget even your sorrows.”
For my grandmother, who had a hard life when she was young, the field seems to have been both a place where she made her living and a place that supported her heart.
Now that I am an adult I work in the city, but whenever I get tired I think of my grandmother’s field.
Last summer, when I visited her house for the first time in a long while, she was standing in the field just as she always had.
When I said I would help, she laughed and had me bring over a little stool.
“You just sit down and talk with me — that’s enough.”
That day, the two of us ate tomatoes that had just been picked.
I am sure I will never forget that taste for as long as I live.
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