I really like staking tomatoes. After a day of pulling weeds, in the heat, it is a very relaxing job. Especially when a late afternoon storm is coming. You can see dark, heavy clouds in the west, and it is so quiet that you can hear bees in the tomato flowers. There is no other noise around.

This quiet and these tomatoes remind me of one poem by Czesław Miłosz, “A Song On the End of the World” where, in the final lines, an old man binds his tomatoes, saying that there won’t be an other end of the world, beside the one which is happening right now. No lightning, no archangels’ trumps will be heard. Just a normal, quiet, lazy afternoon, bees and the smell of tomatoes.

But today it will rain at least, hopefully. In such dry conditions I usually throw popcorn at the TV, when the weather guy sadly announces a chance of clouds and rain. And then he tries to raise everybody’s spirits up, predicting another sunny weekend afterwards. But he does not think about farmers by saying that. “There will be no rain this summer, let’s dance and clap, because drought will decrease the yield, and that will cause an increase of food prices; it is soo good.”

There won’t be an other end of the world.