Four girls perched in a row on the pickup tailgate behind the blueberries are a sight for old eyes on a Saturday morning, their dangling legs keeping time to the bluegrass band serenading the shoppers and the farmers and the faux flâneurs out for a stroll in a parking lot turned country fair for a day. The pasta man offering bargains under his baseball cap, the Happy Boys and Dirty Girls coolly flaunting their greens, the gourmet olive oil entrepreneurs with their tempting bits of bread for dipping in little golden bowls, fruit purveyors with their sweet bright hills all take me home to a farm I’ve never known except in old poems by aging drunks nostalgic for imagined Edens remembered precisely and harvested in language alone.
Four girls perched in a row on the pickup tailgate behind the blueberries are a sight for old eyes on a Saturday morning, their dangling legs keeping time to the bluegrass band serenading the shoppers and the farmers and the faux flâneurs out for a stroll in a parking lot turned country fair for a day. The pasta man offering bargains under his baseball cap, the Happy Boys and Dirty Girls coolly flaunting their greens, the gourmet olive oil entrepreneurs with their tempting bits of bread for dipping in little golden bowls, fruit purveyors with their sweet bright hills all take me home to a farm I’ve never known except in old poems by aging drunks nostalgic for imagined Edens remembered precisely and harvested in language alone. The barbecue dudes are frying bacon and that primal smell almost sends you swooning, but then a whiff of tamales takes you to the force field of some taco truck where you once stopped for a quick bite with your sweetie, and from there you are taken with the fresh scent of whole-grain sourdough loaves and the bakers’ freshly tanned faces. Such mornings of local travel can scarcely be matched by trips to exotic lands where other versions of the same vendors, flowers whose names escape you casting equally chromatic aromas, abundant food for the eyes seduce you the same way, only here you are close to home where you will stash your bounty for a week of savoring. And here is where you feast your nose and ears and eyes on the fullness of a week’s work, or a season’s, brought to fruition. These neighbors you don’t know, these sky-browned faces you almost recognize, these easily circulating people who could be anyone seem to be here forever, playing their mythic roles in the mundane rituals of exchange. Chocolate, that luxury, the essential fuel of coffee, earthy potatoes, sugar-snap peas, strawberries, bunches of basil, even this cool coastal overcast tell of warm days inland when under the spell of summer you could feel your nectar sweetening in the sun.
