Scadding Court Community Centre
Dundas St./Bathurst St.
The morning dawned bright like an alpine spring. Clear blue skies, fresh white powder snow and a crisp bite to every breath you take. Heading downtown to Chinatown today with a couple of bags of tomatillo ‘paradise’ seeds to do some dealing and getting tips on grow ops.
Drugs? Not unless tomatillos causes hallucinations or other extreme sensory reactions. There are only two sensory reactions that need descriptions here, sight and taste. Before I tell you about the dealers let me go back a bit to last summer in the Earlscourt Garden that we were volunteering in.
This is an organic garden. One normally thinks of gardens as a systematic or orderly array of various vegetables or flowers, pleasing to mind and eye. But first glancing at this garden one is struck by the relative chaos and profusion of plants, vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs and flowers. But be assured that there is method to the madness, a symbiotic diversity, a botanical multicultural consensus. This garden reflects the diversity of the cultures in that neighbourhood and the one plant in particular that eventually caught my attention is the tomatillo.
At first it looked to me like they were growing chinese lanterns and like most everyone they were curiously tempting to touch. They were very papery and empty. This invited a yell from the boss man as they are very fragile! As time went by they grew bigger or rather fuller. They are about the size of, ummm… chinese lanterns; actually about two inches round and always green.
One day the boss man pointed to one of these and not having touched one since being yelled at it was surprisingly heavy and solid, full to almost bursting. And I thought they were purely ornamental like the flowers. But nothing is just ornamental in this garden everything has a reason. He peeled away the paper shell and behold the tomatillo, like a little green tomato, in it’s ripe glory.
And the taste?! Not knowing what to expect I took a bite and was rewarded with mouth-watering experience with visions of the Paradise of Eden! It was the perfect marriage of tomato and an apple, kind of like Adam and Eve. And if you believe having visions is synonymous with mind altering drugs you could be right. Keeping in mind that everything is an illusion and relative as a fingerprint and thus life is what you make it!
Where was I? ….
No comments:
Post a Comment